Giganews first released the Giganews accelerator software in May 2007 in an effort to further improve header download performance and ensure 256-bit SSL encryption. How can it compress and encrypt header if your newsgroup reader doesn’t support SSL? That was our first question.
As it turns out the Giganews accelerator is a software-based proxy that can compress headers and enable 256-bit SSL encryption without relying on your Usenet client. Even better the program doesn’t require you to have an SSL-enabled Giganews account. Not to confuse things though. We recommend adding SSL encryption to any Giganews account. It is included with Diamond access. The reason being that the Giganews accelerator will encrypt header downloads but you still need an SSL-enabled account to encrypt the article downloads.
According to the Giganews accelerator page the software will help you download headers up to 10 times faster than normal. We tested in Newsbin Pro and found a significant difference in performance. We already had SSL enabled in Newsbin before the test so we went into the setup and disabled it. Since the Giganews accelerator runs outside your newsreader it will support any NNTP based Usenet client.
Here are a few tips for setting up Giganews accelerator:
After installing Giganews accelerator setup the news server address in your newsgroup reader to “localhost” and port to 119.
This will tell the newsreader to pass all traffic through the Giganews accelerator proxy.
If you previously had SSL enabled in the newsreader disable it for the Giganews server. Giganews accelerator will take care of it.
Leave the other information including username, password and number of connections unchanged.
Note: if you subscribe to more than one Usenet provider leave SSL enabled for other servers.
While it is possible to toggle SSL on and off in the Giganews accelerator the default is on and we suggest you not change it.
If you want to limit the speed of header downloads the Giganews accelerator includes a rate limiting feature. This is helpful if you want to browse the web while downloading.
