r/SABnzbd

I'm looking to setup a download serverwhere multiple people can "drop" .nzb files for the client to grab.

I was thinking about doing this with a Google drive folder or similar.

Is this possible and if so how is best to implement it?

Hey guys, I've been trying to solve this problem on my own for awhile and can't figure it out. My download speeds through sabnzbd are significantly lower than any limit on the hardware throughout my entire path.

Hardware:
1x 256GB SSD (used for app config storage, not media)
4x 10TB Western Digital Red Plus CMR 512mb cache media pool (On WD website claims up to250MB/s transfer rate)
5 Gigabit ethernet NIC + 5 gigabit ethernet service (speedtested ~4-4.5gigabit)
Truenas Operating system using raidz2 storage structure for media
app config storage on ssd is a solo drive no mirroring but is replicated to media pool nightly

Location: US

Originally I was just using thundernews (unlimited data account with 50 connections max) as my sole main provider with a much lower prio block account on a different provider that is basically never used. I was reaching max speeds of 80MB/s with thundernews using 50 connections. I tried adjusting number of connections to check if it was related to overhead so I did tests at every 5 connections. Lowering connections only made download speed worse. Turning off SSL did not affect download speed at all. I monitored hdd usage using zpool iostat on the truenas shell and the hdd's are sitting idle a majority of the time, same with cpu, so they do not seem to be the bottleneck right now.

I then added a second equal priority provider in Newshosting (unlimited data + 30 connections). This using 30 connections and thundernews still using 50 connections immediately jumped my download speed to ~110MB/s. a near 50% increase but still a far cry from my hardware bottleneck which I assume to be my hard drives. The immediate jump in download speed also signals to me that hardware is not my current limitation, as I did not change hardware at all to reach higher speeds. I don't expect to actually hit the 250MB/s stated rate of the hard drives, but 110MB/s still seems very low.

I know I can move over to ssd's for downloading however they are significantly more expensive for the amount of storage. I've thought about setting up a temporary small storage (~1tb) ssd for downloading and then creating a nightly job that moves downloads from the ssd to the hdd's. I could do this but before I do this I wanted to try and exhaust all my easy options with my current setup since attempting this will complicate the setup a bit more and might be more prone to errors.

Does anyone have any suggestions on why I'm not hitting higher download speeds with this setup? I've seen multiple people say that they have reached 500+ MB/s speeds with thundernews so I'm surprised that I seem unable to go higher with just thundernews or with double providers (yes I know they are using ssd's but I'm not hdd limited yet).

EDIT 1:
forgot to put in original post that I have already done sabnzbd test file and checked sab speed test of download/complete folder. the download folder values change pretty significantly on every refresh:

System performance (Pystone)  623271AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D 8-Core Processor AVX2  
Download folder speed  117.7 MB/s    /data/usenet/incomplete  
Complete folder speed  154.4 MB/s/data/usenet/complete  
Internet Bandwidth  439.42 MB/s3515.36 Mbps

Source [https://sabnzbd.org/tests/test\_download\_10GB.nzb](https://sabnzbd.org/tests/test_download_10GB.nzb)

Download Downloaded in 1 min 28 seconds at an average of 109.2 MB/s

I also ran an fio job on my harddrives and got ~297MB/s which is roughly 2.5x faster than the download speed I'm seeing through sabnzbd:

fio --name=randwrite --rw=randwrite --bs=256k --size=20G --iodepth=16 --filename=/mnt/data/media/testfile --direct=1
randwrite: (g=0): rw=randwrite, bs=(R) 256KiB-256KiB, (W) 256KiB-256KiB, (T) 256KiB-256KiB, ioengine=psync, iodepth=16

fio-3.33
Starting 1 process
randwrite: Laying out IO file (1 file / 20480MiB)
note: both iodepth >= 1 and synchronous I/O engine are selected, queue depth will be capped at 1

Jobs: 1 (f=1): \[w(1)\]\[100.0%\]\[w=221MiB/s\]\[w=885 IOPS\]\[eta 00m:00s\]
randwrite: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=1912518: Sun Jun 28 12:56:06 2026

  write: IOPS=1131, BW=283MiB/s (297MB/s)(20.0GiB/72421msec); 0 zone resets

clat (usec): min=579, max=284015, avg=881.55, stdev=3771.58
lat (usec): min=581, max=284017, avg=883.14, stdev=3771.59
clat percentiles (usec):

|  1.00th=\[   586\],  5.00th=\[   594\], 10.00th=\[   594\], 20.00th=\[   603\],
| 30.00th=\[   611\], 40.00th=\[   619\], 50.00th=\[   709\], 60.00th=\[   750\],
| 70.00th=\[   799\], 80.00th=\[   832\], 90.00th=\[  1057\], 95.00th=\[  1319\],
| 99.00th=\[  1582\], 99.50th=\[  1811\], 99.90th=\[ 33817\], 99.95th=\[ 69731\],
| 99.99th=\[191890\]

   bw (  KiB/s): min=104448, max=421376, per=100.00%, avg=289655.20, stdev=83868.08, samples=144

   iops        : min=  408, max= 1646, avg=1131.46, stdev=327.62, samples=144
  lat (usec)   : 750=58.87%, 1000=30.53%
  lat (msec)   : 2=10.16%, 4=0.16%, 10=0.08%, 20=0.06%, 50=0.05%
  lat (msec)   : 100=0.05%, 250=0.03%, 500=0.01%
  cpu          : usr=0.38%, sys=48.68%, ctx=83201, majf=4, minf=9
  IO depths    : 1=100.0%, 2=0.0%, 4=0.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, >=64=0.0%

submit    : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
complete  : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
issued rwts: total=0,81920,0,0 short=0,0,0,0 dropped=0,0,0,0
latency   : target=0, window=0, percentile=100.00%, depth=16

Run status group 0 (all jobs):
WRITE: bw=283MiB/s (297MB/s), 283MiB/s-283MiB/s (297MB/s-297MB/s), io=20.0GiB (21.5GB), run=72421-72421msec

I have it in my taskbar but 9/10 times when I start a task, it kills the icon in the taskbar but runs in the background.

Yes, I know it's to be expected with beta software. Just wondering if others have noticed or even have a work around.

https://sabnzbd.org/downloads

This is the second beta release of version 5.1. We will probably add (a few) new features in upcoming testing releases, but we already wanted to share the current improvements with you!

New features in 5.1.0

• Refreshed the interface.
• When Retrying a job, only the actually missing articles are tried again. This only works for jobs downloaded in 5.1.0 (or newer).
• RSS-items are now stored in the database instead of on disk.
• Downloaded RSS-items are cleared from RSS-database after 3 days.
• Add support for filename and path pattern matching to the Cleanup List.
• Allow job setting changes directly from Extra queue columns.
• Added support for unpacking .tar files during post-processing.
• Improved anonymization of the logs when using Show Logging.
• New Servers will default to 16 connections instead of 8.
• Parsing of header-encrypted RAR's will use significantly less resources.
• Removed redundant INSTALL.txt file.
• Dropped support for Python 3.9.

Bug fixes in 5.1.0

• Prevent incorrect warnings about non-writeable directories.
• Files unrelated to job could get removed by the Cleanup List logic.
• Windows: Uninstall would not remove Settings or Windows Service.
• Windows: Warn for OS-limit if more than 1024 connections are configured.
• macOS: AppleDouble files could result in failures in Moving stage.
• macOS: Restarting the application resulted in Terminal window.

Upgrade notices

• You can directly upgrade from version 3.0.0 and newer.
• Upgrading from older versions will require performing a Queue repair.
• Downgrading from version 4.2.0 or newer to 3.7.2 or older will require performing a Queue repair due to changes in the internal data format.

Known problems and solutions

• Read ISSUES.txt or https://sabnzbd.org/wiki/introduction/known-issues

Code Signing Policy

Windows code signing is provided by SignPath.io using a SignPath Foundation certificate.

About

SABnzbd is an open-source cross-platform binary newsreader. It simplifies the process of downloading from Usenet dramatically, thanks to its web-based user interface and advanced built-in post-processing options that automatically verify, repair, extract and clean up posts downloaded from Usenet.

(c) Copyright 2007-2026 by The SABnzbd-Team (sabnzbd.org)

I us sabnzbd irregularly. I understand it will create worker threads when in use and they will obviously use as much RAM as required to do what they need to do. I'm wondering why those threads continue to stay open and eating RAM after the downloads are all complete. Even for days and weeks afterward with no additional downloads.

Thanks!