I’m relatively new to using Usenet for downloading TV episodes, so forgive me if this is something that is “common knowledge”. I’ve read the wiki page about failed download handling, and I think I understand what it’s saying. But I don’t see any mention of how the Grace Period, Retry Interval, and Retry Count settings come into play. I had a couple of downloads fail last night (using SABnzbd) because of missing articles. The actual errors were different, though: “Repair failed, not enough repair blocks” and No details available for recoverable file number 1". From the NzbDrone logs, I saw that upon failure, an individual episode search was performed for each. One found an alternate download, one did not. I guess my question is this: should a download have been blacklisted after a single failed download? When articles are missing, does it mean that episode had been targeted for DMCA takedown and there is no sense in retrying it? And do the Grace Period, Retry Interval, and Retry Count settings affect blacklisting at all (mine are set to 2, 30, and 2 respectively)? Thanks in advance.
Ahh yes, the wiki needs to be updated, but the inline help in drone should have a basic description of what they do.
Grace Period - Age in hours that the NZB will not be immediately blacklisted, but will be left in SAB and retried
Retry Interval - Delay before retrying a failed download (ones covered by the grace period)
Retry Count - How many times to retry before looking for another release
Yes, missing blocks are usually a case of DMCA, unless you add a block account retrying will be mostly useless.
Does the “age in hours” mean from the time the NZB was posted, or the time that it was grabbed? Because, according to my logs, the episode of Revolution last night was immediately blacklisted when the first failure was reported by SAB. Because of the way I have my system setup to gracefully handle OTA recorded TV as well as downloads, I schedule the RSS sync via Task Scheduler–and it doesn’t start until 11:00p. So I’m guessing that what happened was that the Grace Period started when the NZB was posted, not when it was grabbed, meaning that as soon as it failed the period had already expired and it was blacklisted. Sound plausible?
Its from the time it was posted, it is there mainly to deal with the issue of propagation, where files are posted, but haven’t yet been pushed to all servers and when you go to grab it your server doesn’t have all the parts available (missing blocks).
Missing blocks after a few hours generally means DMCA.
If I specify the Retry Count to 0, does that mean that the Grace Period is useless? With this setup, as soon as the download fails it is immediately blacklisted and NOT retried, right?
Yes, that should do it. Why do you want this behavior though?
Because usually the downloads that fail on me are DMCA’d, well at least of the time, and redownloading it wouldn’t do anything, right?
I mean what is the main purpose of the default settings of these settings (grace period and retry)? When does one want to retry a failed download?
Propagation issues, if it was posted in the last hour or two and failed its likely due to propagation, unlikely that DMCA hit it that fast.
What do you mean last hour or two? Can you give a concrete example with time stamps? Sorry, I just want to understand.
An hour or two prior to a failure, there are a few threads on the forums about the issue already.
Ok. So it’s best to leave those settings at their default? But why is the default grace period 2 hours if it will be just retried once anyway?
Yes, unless you have a concrete reason to change it, you should leave it.
Why would the grace period and retry count being set the way they are matter? If the release is DMCA’d its likely older than 2 hours so this doesn’t even apply.
Wait I’m not sure if I understand grace period and retry count correctly. Let’s say my settings are the default ones which is 2 hours and 1 retry. So when a release fails it is automatically retried one more time and what if it fails again, it will stay at the queue for more or less 2 hours before it gets removed?
Or is it that after one try, it will immediately be removed from the queue even though the grace period is set to 2 hours?
Grace period is time after posting, not after it was grabbed.
If it was posted at 7pm and drone grabbed it at 7:15pm and it failed, it would be retried once after waiting 1hr (approx 8:15pm).
If it was post at 7pm and drone grabbed it at 10pm and it failed it would be immediately blacklisted.
Ah. So technically the definition of grace period in the interface should be changed since it’s kinda misleading because it just says the age in hours that a release will remain in the download client and retried.
Any ideas?
Changing it to Age in hours after posted that a release… would be enough I reckon.
Has this option been deleted?
I can only find the delay profiles, and not the actual retry count, it just auto blacklists after it failed in SAB.
Yes, it was doing more harm than good. We have more plans to improve it, this was just the first step, if you have propagation issues, you can use a delay (indexer settings).
Yeah, I saw that…thanks. I will just have to up the delay time some.