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Why PS4 downloads are so slow

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Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#161

Post by matwood »

jsnell wrote: post #31
foobarbazetc wrote: post #29

The CDN thing is an issue too. Using a local DNS resolver instead of Google DNS helped my PS4 speeds. The other "trick" if a download is getting slow is to run the in built "network test". This seems to reset all the windows back even if other things are running.

> The other "trick" if a download is getting slow is to run the in built "network test". This seems to reset all the windows back even if other things are running. I did not see that in my testing. The built in speedtest runs with a large receive window, but the store downloads are not affected. (You can see an example in the last graph; there's a speedtest early on that has a receive window 100x larger than the PSN…

> It's probably just a placebo.

Possibly, but I think the OP above was onto something about it 'resetting' the windows. I just tested downloading a large game while I had another game running. The PS4 showed it was going to take 6 hours. I closed the other game I had running, and it still showed 6 hours. I ran the speed test, and now it shows it's going to take 50 minutes.

BTW, thanks for running these tests as I have some stuff to try instead of waiting hours for a game to download :)

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#162

Post by criddell »

cuckcuckspruce wrote: post #88
colechristensen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I read stories like this I'm bothered by the fact that the author didn't go to their credit card company and chargeback the unwanted purpose. Your credit card is a powerful tool to mitigate retailers not giving you what you expect, using it motivates bad actors quite well. Chargebacks are expensive and too many chargebacks leads to unfavorable terms with the credit card companies which are inescapable to the ret…

Sony bans your PlayStation Store account and you lose all your games when you do a chargeback[1]. Yet another reason to never buy digital downloads from Sony. Edit: Steam puts your account in a restricted mode when you issue a chargeback[2]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/2ivsz3/beware_if_you_s... [2] https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=6687-HJV...

I bought Katamari on the PS4 store and had trouble getting it to work. I called them up and they just refunded my money instantly. I was hoping for tech support to help me get it working.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#163

Post by MBCook »

kogepathic wrote: post #140
ew wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go watch some of the major streamers on Twitch. They're constantly trying to figure out why they're dropping frames or why SLI is suddenly fucking up. The illusion that the PC-Master-Race folks like to push is that maintaining and building PCs is easy. Having built many, and owned a computer repair shop, I know that it simply isn't that easy for your average consumer to troubleshoot a computer.

> I know that it simply isn't that easy for your average consumer to troubleshoot a computer. I don't see how you can state that it's any easier to troubleshoot a console. Usually your only feedback is a generic error code which if you Google refers to 20 different problems all with the same error, or an LED blink code which is equally vague. Sure, PCs have their own unique problems that consoles don't suffer from (e…

See that's the thing. I've been a console gamer since the NES and I don't remember ever really having to troubleshoot one.

And since the hardware is fixed games don't have incompatibilities. None of the "this version of the driver causes this but that version of the driver causes that" issues. No worrying about system requirements. If it sold for the system, it will play.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#164

Post by MBCook »

HumbleGamer wrote: post #124
govg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upgrading a PC is a one time thing you need to do once every few years. You'd be "upgrading" your console by putting it in the bin and buying a new one, so I'm not sure what the argument is against PC gaming here...

There is a convenience factor. You dont have to think if you will be able to play 'xxxx' game on your ps4, if its a ps4 game. That plays heavily in keeping me away from PC gaming. I just dont want to have to even consider can I play the game or not.

Right. If I was using a PC all the time at home for something else it wouldn't be such a big deal, but given that I was only using it for gaming and most games I wanted to play were on the console it was just easier to give up.

Like you said, it's an appliance and I never have to think about it. You buy a game for the PS4 and it works on your PS4 and that's all there is to it.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#165

Post by MBCook »

ekianjo wrote: post #128
MBCook wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also get the downside of having to maintain/upgrade the PC, which is one of the things I was happy to leave behind when I became a console-only gamer.

> You also get the downside of having to maintain/upgrade the PC, which is one of the things I was happy to leave behind when I became a console-only gamer. Oh, you mean the 15 mins swap of a graphics card every 3 years?

Plus researching WHICH graphics card to buy, plus constant driver upgrades, plus the driver upgrades may cause issues with some of your games...

It's not as bad as it used to be… but it's still not like an appliance.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#166

Post by whipoodle »

khedoros1 wrote: post #123
whipoodle wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do ourselves a kindness when we skip to step 4.

Except step 5 needs two variants, then: "Oh, I see why it happens" and "Oh, I see that it doesn't, so let's find a way to communicate better with the user".

There are a lot of ways that things can go, but starting out with the disposition that either the bug report is wrong or the other machine is somehow made of worse silicon than our own, is rarely helpful.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#167

Post by MBCook »

g09980 wrote: post #36

Want to see something like this for (Apple's) App Store. Downloads are fast, but the App Store experience itself is so, so slow. Takes maybe five seconds to load search results or reviews even on a wi-fi connection.

Reportedly the redesigned App Store in iOS 11 is much faster, hopefully they'll bring that change over to the Mac soon.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#168

Post by bunchspoiler »

cm2187 wrote: post #47
ploxiln wrote: post #18

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 med…

Reminds me of Apple's Jim Reekes "engineers are retarded". https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C5d151lqJsA (The annecdote really starts at 2:30).

Well, he would know about engineers being "retarded". I found him extremely difficult to work with, unwilling to accept that any behavior of his code was a bug, and an all around obnoxious guy.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#169

Post by notyourwork »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #112
MBCook wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also get the downside of having to maintain/upgrade the PC, which is one of the things I was happy to leave behind when I became a console-only gamer.

I have less free time than most here and somehow I find a way. "Maintaining" a PC is super easy...

It is about where you play your priorities.

Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow

#170

Post by philsnow »

stephen_g wrote: post #97
philsnow wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

Hmmm, does that actually improve speeds for Netflix, or was that somebody just doing it because they thought it would? It's been a while since I've looked into it, but I thought that Netflix's devices peer with the provider's routers and intercept traffic through that way, so the DNS server shouldn't matter (because they would share the same IPs as the publicly accessible CDN load balancers). I thought most CDNs work…

I have only my own anecdata, which strongly support the hypothesis.
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