PTS Downloading slow

tfraley · February 2016

Good day guys,

Yet again, I dread downloads from ESO.
I don't understand why I get so slow speeds.

I have 200+ down and 20+ up here at home. I work in IT, so understand how things work.
All ports are open and still get slow connections

Every now and then I will get up to 10MBs but the majority sits around 1.4 and bottoms out at 300k

I never see Windows users have these issues.

To my understanding the downloads work on a torrent/peer to peer infrastructure, is this true?
Is it simply not that many Mac users, to get decent speeds? Wouldn't you think this would be a big turn off for a new user.
If that is simply the case may be a direct download is needed for the Mac version.

Not acceptable to be sitting for days on a download

Here is a screen shot of ESO download, Speedtest and my open ports

KhajitFurTrader · February 2016

Slow download speeds (when compared to downstream bandwidth capabilities of user lines) are not a Mac-only phenomenon, far from it.

There have been numerous suggestions on how to fix, or at least mitigate, this issue all over he forums, most of them involving the change of the name server addresses of the IP connection to Google's DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).

That being said, the Launcher doesn't use any peer to peer technology. It's a third party tool, part and parcel of a game hosting service offered by Solid State Networks, Inc (SSN). SSN buys space and bandwidth capacities with several Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers like Akamai and Amazon Web Services, bundles access to them via a SDK for installers/patchers/launchers, and resells the whole package as a unified service to their business clients.

CDNs provide any user on the globe with a download source which, in internet terms, is relatively near to his or her location, which ensures overall better download speeds. A problem may now arise in the DNS system of the user's ISP: if all customers of said ISP are routed to the same (local) CDN source by the ISP's DNS (maybe it has the lowest peering costs for the ISP), then the bandwidth capacity of this one node might get saturated. Add to this the fact that right now there are a lot of people wanting to download the latest PTS build simultaneously, and download speeds will be low for all. Thus the suggestion of using different DNS servers: the choice of the CDN node might be a bit more random, so the chances that an unstressed node will be used for downloads are improved.

Additionally, this might still be worth a shot. Although I doubt that the OS X App Nap feature is still an issue with the Launcher under El Capitan.

tfraley · February 2016

@KhajitFurTrader

Thank you for taking the time to explain this. I really thought this was based on a peer system which was why speed fluctuates. With that being said, when I changed my DNS to googles that seem to speed things up. This is totally strange, I use an app called nameBench to find the fastest and closest DNS servers to me and use them. Been doing this for years now, With that said the DNS server i'm using is 1/3 faster then googles but yet it works better with ESO. It's hard to belive that it's a bad hope in the route because of so many people having the same issue and that the problem has been here since ESO first came out.

With so many people having the issue I would think it woudl be worth ESO investigating it further and finding where that bad hop may be.

Again thank you for your helpd and clearing things up for me

KhajitFurTrader · February 2016

You're welcome.

It isn't a "bad hop" in the sense that there's a slow system out there somewhere, it's DNS servers routing a multitude of people to the same download resource (which is different for each country and/or ISP), and thus that node's upstream gets saturated.

"Fast" DNS servers can be a wonderful thing when browsing the World Wide Web, as pages usually have dozens, if not hundreds of URLs in them, and the faster they get resolved, the quicker the pages can load. In the case of ESO CDN downloads, these servers might just prove to be a bit disadvantageous, as they seem to point many people to the same resource, instead of spreading them over many.

tfraley · February 2016

KhajitFurTrader wrote: »

You're welcome.

It isn't a "bad hop" in the sense that there's a slow system out there somewhere, it's DNS servers routing a multitude of people to the same download resource (which is different for each country and/or ISP), and thus that node's upstream gets saturated.

"Fast" DNS servers can be a wonderful thing when browsing the World Wide Web, as pages usually have dozens, if not hundreds of URLs in them, and the faster they get resolved, the quicker the pages can load. In the case of ESO CDN downloads, these servers might just prove to be a bit disadvantageous, as they seem to point many people to the same resource, instead of spreading them over many.

So what your saying is that it's the CDN dropping the ball and ESO should be looking into who ever is providing their CDN service.

KhajitFurTrader · February 2016

Um, no, not really. As I said, ZOS buys the hosting and distribution services of SSN, in order to host and distribute the game's clients. SSN in turn buys space and bandwidth capacities with major CDN providers. So, ZOS has no immediate influence about SSN's choice of CDN providers (which already includes the major players). Neither has any influence over how individual ISPs let their customers access those CDNs.

SSN's service is quite unique, in that their offered SDK is multi-platform and lets their business customers develop for OS X and Windows both with the same code. Changing this, provided that there even is a similar product, would hardly be feasible.