Recommend a newsreader to download multipart binaries from usenet

October 27, 2004 8:23 AM

NewsReaders - I'm looking for a good newsreader to download huge multipart binaries from usenet. I've tried Forte Agent and Quadnews, and both choke when downloading massive amounts of headers from my news server {mi}

The news server I use has amazing retention – over a million headers on the group I want. Downloading this header list and scanning them kills my system. Forte creates a file that is about 4 gigabytes. Quadnews seems to choke and use up 80% of my memory. I’m running win2k, 1gig ram, p4 2.8ghz with a broadband connection. My feeling is downloading a header list shouldn’t grind my machine to a halt, but it does. Can anyone offer another suggestion? Is it my newsreader? Is it unrealistic to expect to download all headers for a binary group?

posted by quibx to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I use Pan and it can download all the headers for the bigger DVD groups or mp3.complete_cd or whatever without punishing my system too badly. I think it was a bit more painful with 512 megs of ram and a few other apps running, though. Certainly no multiple-gigabyte swap files! I don't think Pan works under windows.

You might have to get a dedicated binary newsgroup utility. A windows user might be a better candidate to recommend one, but here's a few I found while googling:
Binary Boy
News File Grabber
NewsBin
NewsShark
posted by mragreeable at 8:49 AM on October 27, 2004

Newsbin , it rox.
posted by elpapacito at 9:03 AM on October 27, 2004

I use XNews, which is great except it kills my system when threading huge binaries groups. 100% CPU for seconds. So don't use that.
posted by smackfu at 10:42 AM on October 27, 2004

Power Grab works very well for this purpose. The newest version deals with million header newsgroups very gracefully.
posted by addyct at 11:06 AM on October 27, 2004

xnews xnews xnews xnews xnews xnews xnews xnews xnews xnews xnews xnews mushroom mushroom.

Simple, easy, works well as a newsreader, free. I don't know how well it will deal with trying to download a million headers; the most I've dealt with is 70,000--100,000. Takes a while but no problem on my P4 2.8/512. There's a facility built into xnews to download only some of the headers; you might find this useful.

I don't hit a CPU-usage problem. Dollars to donuts says that CPU use on a P4 will top out at 50% anyway unless they've rewritten it to take advantage of hyperthreading.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:15 AM on October 27, 2004

NewsLeecher (free trial available) seems really fast to me, plus it looks prettier than NewsBin.
posted by milov at 4:44 AM on October 28, 2004

I don't know about its ability to handle downloading excessive amounts of headers, but Grabit is my newsreader of choice for downloading binaries. In fact, it's mostly just for downloading binaries as it's rather thin in the single post reading department (you can do it, it's just designed for downloading and compiling binaries).
posted by filmgoerjuan at 10:07 AM on October 28, 2004