I always assumed the answer was "because Sony is a hardware company that has never understood the first thing about software."
Turns out I was right.
Why PS4 downloads are so slow
91–100 of 201 posts
Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha, what a great video. To some extent he's onto something. Sometimes you are in this zone when everything will work if you just do this one quick little hack, and then the hack ends up not getting replaced with a proper solution, and in the end you end up with a harddrive right next to a speaker >.<
There actually seem to be people whose default mode of operation seems to lie entirely in that zone though. I'm pretty sure everyone arrives at a similar conclusion if they realise that attempts to fix a certain person's code always end in a express trip to the 6th stage of debugging [1]... [1]: http://plasmasturm.org/log/6debug/
We do ourselves a kindness when we skip to step 4.
Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they are in a dominant market position. Honestly, it's your fault for buying a console - you knew you'd be at sony's mercy due to the monopolistic nature of consoles. The cost of switching to the one comparible console option is so great, most people will not bother unless sony's issues become too great - and network speed is presumably not a deal-breaker for enough people for sony to care. So you will contin…
I left PC gaming behind years ago. I like to sit on the couch and I want my gaming device to be a black box that does its job and is dedicated to couch based entertainment (I use it for TV too). PC gaming requires a...... PC... usually sitting at a desk, much more powerful than I need, lots of configuration etc etc to hard.... I'm a couch gamer in the evening after the programming is done. I don't care much about the…
> I don't care much about the PlayStation download thing. I generally prefer to buy my games on DVD anyway.
Yeah, wait until you will have 30GB update for a game to download.
Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they are in a dominant market position. Honestly, it's your fault for buying a console - you knew you'd be at sony's mercy due to the monopolistic nature of consoles. The cost of switching to the one comparible console option is so great, most people will not bother unless sony's issues become too great - and network speed is presumably not a deal-breaker for enough people for sony to care. So you will contin…
I left PC gaming behind years ago. I like to sit on the couch and I want my gaming device to be a black box that does its job and is dedicated to couch based entertainment (I use it for TV too). PC gaming requires a...... PC... usually sitting at a desk, much more powerful than I need, lots of configuration etc etc to hard.... I'm a couch gamer in the evening after the programming is done. I don't care much about the…
I have a Steam Link, and I get all the benefits of PC gaming from my couch. It's a pretty seamless best-of-both-worlds situation.
Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow
#95I remember someone hacking at this issue a while ago. They blocked Sony Japan's server, of which the download was coming from. The Playstation the fetched the file from a more local server, of which the speed was considerable faster.
Really strange
Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
There actually seem to be people whose default mode of operation seems to lie entirely in that zone though. I'm pretty sure everyone arrives at a similar conclusion if they realise that attempts to fix a certain person's code always end in a express trip to the 6th stage of debugging [1]... [1]: http://plasmasturm.org/log/6debug/
Definitely. And that "quick hack by default" person will often end up being the favorite of management because they get so many things "done." So it's important to figure out what kind of manager you have, and try not to be the slow guy on a team full of quick-hack people. You won't look good and nobody will be happy.
> the slow guy on a team full of quick-hack people
isn't that called 'cultural fit'?
Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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 worked that way now - using DNS never really worked well.
Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow
#98Sorry for the newbie question, but can someone explain why the round trip time is so important for transfer speeds? From the formula I'm guessing something like this happens: server sends DATA to client, client receives DATA then sends ACK to server, server receives ACK and then finally goes ahead and sends DATA2 to the client. But TCP numbers their packets and so I would expect them to continue sending new packets w…
Because Sony has (naïvely) limited download speeds by limiting how many packets can be "in flight" at a given time.
Say for example that they clamped it down to a single packet in flight. In that case, if the server was 30ms (round trip time) away then you could only get a packet every 30ms, and if the server was 60ms away then it would cut your speed in half.
In normal situations this doesn't happen: your max-packets-in-flight limit (aka your receive window) will eventually scale large enough that it doesn't matter how far you are from a server, the speed will eventually reach the bandwidth limit of the slowest part of the route.
Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow
#99Sorry for the newbie question, but can someone explain why the round trip time is so important for transfer speeds? From the formula I'm guessing something like this happens: server sends DATA to client, client receives DATA then sends ACK to server, server receives ACK and then finally goes ahead and sends DATA2 to the client. But TCP numbers their packets and so I would expect them to continue sending new packets w…
I think this is a good question, I did some reading myself! The blog post talks about "receive windows" which comes into play here. The server will send up to the number of bytes specified in the receive window before needing to start seeing some ACKs. So the shorter the round trip time, the less likely the server is to spend time twiddling it's thumbs waiting for an ack, because it's exhausted its receive window. Of…
That's right. In the case of a download, the receive window can also be visualized as a limit on the number of packets that are allowed to be "in flight" at once.
Shrinking the window is the wrong tool for the job here, like hammering in a screw. It's sensitive to round-trip-time in a way that makes it impossible to equate a given window with a desired speed. A better method might be to monitor download speed and delay ACKs when it exceeds the limit, but traditionally Unix doesn't have a standard API to do this.
Re: Why PS4 downloads are so slow
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Wasting space is a byproduct of having too much space. Just because it's bloated does not mean they didn't know it was bloated. They probably didn't care. As time goes by, minimum hardware requirements for operating systems increase. This isn't because it is more difficult to write software, or the hardware stopped being capable of doing the same thing it used to do. It's because software design wastes more resources…
I don't know. I like static linking. I'd rather I like things that just work ™. I mean look at PHP for Windows. I can't run php --version because I don't have visual C++ installed. Why? Wouldn't it be easier to include everything you need with your binaries? How much extra stuff are we talking?
To me, RAM and processor are much scarcer resources.