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These are known issues regarding the working of SABnzbd in its environment.
They are not registered as bugs of SABnzbd, because we cannot solve them.
It's more an incompatibility with other systems or outright bugs in these other systems.

• Size limit
• Hangup of post-processing
• Decoder failure: Out of memory
• Memory usage (leaks)
• Unreliable Usenet servers
• macOS and foreign characters
• Linux and foreign characters
• Files remain in Watched Folder
• Instability on macOS
• Blocked email
• Mounting external drives and network shares
• Speed drops to KB/s when using a VPN
• Data downloaded of all items when some items set to Force

Size limit

To prevent unexpectedly large NZBs from eating your quotum you can set the option "size_limit" in "Config->Special".
Any NZB larger than this size will be set to paused and get a low priority.

Hangup of post-processing

When PAR2 or UNRAR hang up, you should never just stop SABnzbd.
Instead use your operating system's task manager to stop the PAr2 or UNRAR program.
Forcing SABnzbd to quit may damage your queues.

Decoder failure: Out of memory

If you get the Decoder failure: Out of memory error, try the following:

• Reduce Article Cache to 450M
• If you run SABnzbd as a Windows Service, try running it not as a Service but regular. When SABnzbd is used as a service, Windows can unpredictably limit the allocation of memory to SABnzbd when it thinks it's usage is too high.

Memory usage (leaks)

Some users have complained about ever growing memory use by SABnzbd.
So far we have not been able to reproduce this behavior, but that doesn't mean it can never happen.
We would like to receive information on how to reproduce this problem.
In particular on Synology (SynoCommunity) the device may report that SABnzbd is using a lot of memory even when idle. In this case the memory is usually not actually used by SABnzbd and will be available if required by other apps or the system. More information can be found in the discussion here.

Unreliable Usenet servers

Some Usenet servers have intermittent login (or other) problems.
For these, the server blocking method is not very favorable.
There is an "Special" option "no_penalties" which, when set to 1, will limit blocks to 1 minute
(No, 2 doesn't mean 2 minutes).

macOS and foreign characters

On macOS you may encounter downloaded files with foreign characters (e.g. é and ä).
The par2 repair may fail when the files were created on a Windows system.
The problem is caused by the PAR2 utility and we cannot fix this now.
This does not apply to files inside RAR files.

Linux and foreign characters

On Linux when you download files they may have the wrong character encoding.
You will see this only when downloaded files contain accented characters.
You need to fix it yourself by running the convmv utility (available for most Linux platforms).

Files remain in Watched Folder

The "Watched Folder" sometimes fails to delete the NZB files it has processed.
This happens when other software still accesses these files.
Some third-party utilities supporting SABnzbd are known to do this.
We cannot solve this problem, because the Operating System (read Windows) prevents the removal.
SABnzbd does try about 10 times with 5 second intervals, but after that it gives up.
The NZB will not be processed again, unless changed or overwritten.

Instability on macOS

A few people complained about long-term stability of SABnzbd on macOS Snow Leopard and Lion.
We don't know the real cause, but the same people have reported success
when they disable SABnzbd's icon in the top menu.
Config->Special, item "osx_menu".

Blocked email

When SABnzbd cannot send notification emails, check your virus scanner, firewall or security suite.
It may be blocking outgoing email.

Mounting external drives and network shares

When you are using external drives or network shares on macOS or Linux make sure that the drives are mounted.
The operating system will simply redirect your files to alternative locations.
You may have trouble finding the files when mounting the drive later.

Speed drops to KB/s when using a VPN

If you experience speed-drops to KB/s when using a VPN, try setting the number of connections to your servers to a total of 7. There is a CPU-usage reduction feature in SABnzbd that gets confused by the way some VPN's handle the state of a connection. Below 8 connections this feature is not active.

Data downloaded of all items when some items set to Force

If the queue is paused but one or more jobs have the Force priority, SABnzbd might still download some data from other jobs in the queue if active servers have unused connections.