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Why PS4 downloads are so slow

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Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#11

Post by philsnow »

menacingly wrote: post #6
ckorhonen wrote: post #2

Interesting - definitely a problem I've encountered, though I had assumed the issues fell more on the CDN side of things. Anecdotally, when I switched DNS servers to Google vs. my ISP, PS4 download speeds improved significantly (20 minutes vs. 20 hours to download a a typical game).

I have slow downloads too (with google DNS), but I would think this wouldn't impact it much. It's not like it's performing a DNS lookup for each chunk, right?

Well no, the issue is that the ps4 is constraining the tcp receive window (which is how much data is in flight at once), so if your ISP DNS gives you a CDN node that's 200ms away but google's DNS gives you a CDN node that's 10ms away, you get receive_window bytes every 10ms instead of every 200ms.

There's a similar thing happening (different DNS giving vastly different experience) with Netflix as well: Netflix has local nodes _inside_ many ISP's networks, close to ISP subscribers. If you use your ISP's DNS (and if they're doing their job properly), they'll send you to one of the local nodes and it'll take much less time to buffer, your stream will start faster, you'll drop less etc. Whereas if you use Google's DNS, they don't (necessarily) know the inner workings of your ISP so they send you to a generic Netflix CDN node that's near-ish but still probably 10-100x "farther" as the photon flies.

If you want to have a mix of DNS settings per domain name, you can set up a dnsmasq inside your network and configure it to recurse to google's DNS normally but recurse to your ISP's DNS for just netflix.com, nflxvideo.com etc. see for instance [0] for one way to set that up. they have it running on a dd-wrt router but I have it running just on some rando linux machine somewhere in the house and configure my DHCP to tell everything to use that machine's IP as the primary DNS.

[0] https://github.com/ab77/netflix-proxy/wiki/setting-up-netfli...

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#13

Post by erikrothoff »

Totally unrelated but: Dang it must be awesome to have a service that people dissect at this level. This analysis is more in depth and knowledgable than anything I've ever seen while employed at large companies, where people are literally paid to spend time on the product.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#14

Post by tortasaur »

frik wrote: post #3

PS4 and Switch have at least no peer-to-peer download. Win10 and XboxOne have peer-to-peer download - who would want that, bad for users, wasting upload bandwidth and counts against your monthly internet consumption. https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/3rhs4s/xbox_update...

I want that, as it normalizes the need for large upload bandwidth. The only reason it's such a scarce commodity now is that households aren't perceived as needing that bandwidth.

The proliferation of legal peer-to-peer systems will hopefully drive the spread of symmetric connections.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#15

Post by deelowe »

frik wrote: post #3

PS4 and Switch have at least no peer-to-peer download. Win10 and XboxOne have peer-to-peer download - who would want that, bad for users, wasting upload bandwidth and counts against your monthly internet consumption. https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/3rhs4s/xbox_update...

Do people really have issues with bandwith limits on uploads? I've always heard the opposite.

Is it P2P or more like torrent where there are multiple peers? That would make more sense.

At the end of the day, isn't the switch and xbox faster at downloading? That's what really matters.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#16

Post by MBCook »

tortasaur wrote: post #14
frik wrote: post #3

PS4 and Switch have at least no peer-to-peer download. Win10 and XboxOne have peer-to-peer download - who would want that, bad for users, wasting upload bandwidth and counts against your monthly internet consumption. https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/3rhs4s/xbox_update...

I want that, as it normalizes the need for large upload bandwidth. The only reason it's such a scarce commodity now is that households aren't perceived as needing that bandwidth. The proliferation of legal peer-to-peer systems will hopefully drive the spread of symmetric connections.

One of the reasons I switched off of AT&T uVerse is they seemed to give you the absolute minimum upload bandwidth needed to achieve the advertised download bandwidth.

So if you were downloading or streaming and uploaded anything more than a small image your download speed would plummet as you ran out of upstream bandwidth.

Online backups/syncing? Hope you're not trying to do anything else that requires bandwidth.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#17

Post by PaulHoule »

erikrothoff wrote: post #13

Totally unrelated but: Dang it must be awesome to have a service that people dissect at this level. This analysis is more in depth and knowledgable than anything I've ever seen while employed at large companies, where people are literally paid to spend time on the product.

It is astonishing how oblivious people who are "paid to spend time on the product" can be about the products they ship.

Case in point, Microsoft shipped a EXPLORER.EXE with Windows 10 that is 20% whitespace because of an Adobe invented metadata format that I bet nobody involved with Windows ever thought about it. See

http://ontology2.com/essays/LookingForMetadataInAllTheWrongP...

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#18

Post by ploxiln »

Reminds me of how Windows Vista's "Multimedia Class Scheduler Service" would put a low cap on network throughput if any sound was playing:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/follow-up-playing-music-severel...

Mark Russinovich justified it by explaining that the network interrupt routine was just too expensive to be able to guarantee no glitches in media playback, so it was limited to 10 packets per millisecond when any media was playing:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/2007/08/...

but obviously this is a pretty crappy one-size-fits-all prioritization scheme for something marketed as a most-sophisticated best-ever OS at the time:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/2008/02/...

Many people had perfectly consistent mp3 playback when copying files over the network 10 times as fast in other OSes (including Win XP!)

Often a company will have a "sophisticated best-ever algorithm" and then put in a hacky lazy work-around for some problem, and obviously don't tell anyone about it. Sometimes the simpler less-sophisticated solution just works better in practice.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#19

Post by Spooky23 »

deelowe wrote: post #15
frik wrote: post #3

PS4 and Switch have at least no peer-to-peer download. Win10 and XboxOne have peer-to-peer download - who would want that, bad for users, wasting upload bandwidth and counts against your monthly internet consumption. https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/3rhs4s/xbox_update...

Do people really have issues with bandwith limits on uploads? I've always heard the opposite. Is it P2P or more like torrent where there are multiple peers? That would make more sense. At the end of the day, isn't the switch and xbox faster at downloading? That's what really matters.

My network has multiple iOS devices, two computers and a bunch of appliance devices I also use voip.

Maxing out the standard 3mb uplink is easy when photos sync or any number of other use cases.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#20

Post by MBCook »

deelowe wrote: post #15
frik wrote: post #3

PS4 and Switch have at least no peer-to-peer download. Win10 and XboxOne have peer-to-peer download - who would want that, bad for users, wasting upload bandwidth and counts against your monthly internet consumption. https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/3rhs4s/xbox_update...

Do people really have issues with bandwith limits on uploads? I've always heard the opposite. Is it P2P or more like torrent where there are multiple peers? That would make more sense. At the end of the day, isn't the switch and xbox faster at downloading? That's what really matters.

Many companies offer asymmetric bandwidth, especially on DSL. So depending on what kind of broadband you have you may not have much upload bandwidth at all.

See my other comment in this post for an example.

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