Slow download speed

I had to reinstall my windows recently, and now while downloading the game, I'm getting a constant speed of 500 kb/sec. My net speed is 100 mbps, I download from Europe-based servers at 6-7 mb/s, and from servers in my country at 10 mb/s. Is it possible that I'm being fed data from a US-based server, instead of a European one? I just can't explain to myself why my speed is so pitiful. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

GW2 deals in thousands of smaller files. The overhead is huge, so it takes longer to actually make the request than to download it. It's not actually possible to download at your full speed when dealing in these smaller files, but if this is the case, you should notice the file count changing in larger amounts.

If you want to try other patch servers, open a command prompt (cmd.exe) and enter:nslookup assetcdn.101.arenanetworks.com

You use one of the IPs with the -assetsrv option:-assetsrv 0.0.0.0

If you want to find out how close the servers are, you can trying pinging them, though not all will respond to pings.

If you want to do a simple speed test, you can try downloading Gw2-64.exe (~32MB), though to try different IPs, you'll either need to edit your hosts file or edit the header (if your browser supports it):http://assetcdn.101.arenanetworks.com/program/101/1/0/1944433

I don't see how having to go through such complicated steps just to achieve a normal download speed (500 kbps is not normal in any way) is considered acceptable?

500 KB/s is normal, when the files it's downloading are only a few KB each. To test what your top speed actually is, you need a bigger sample, so try downloading Gw2-64.exe. If it's not slow, there's no point in trying to find a better server.

@Healix.5819 said:500 KB/s is normal,

500 KB/s is NOT Normal when his internet service provider offers 100 Mbps (assuming he's not talking about 100 MB/s, which would be a Gigabit connection, but is still very not normal). What could be normal is a potential server outage and/or a surplus of users downloading from a particular server, all at once.

Depending on his area congestion on that particular server, Steam for example (the gaming program) is notorious for such server congestion... it is generally not very forgiving for a potential user request when asking for files to download. Blizzard Entertainment, however, are great when it comes to Peer-to-Peer file transfer. They generally give users excellent download speeds to their servers. (This said, i'm NA and have excellent download speeds from Blizzard, unsure about EU.

If people need to check their local download speeds from servers, that would be speed tests from websites like Speedtest.net or their own ISP provider's website.(NOTE: If able, pick the server closes to your location)

@"Saiyan.1704" said:500 KB/s is NOT Normal when his internet service provider offers 100 Mbps (assuming he's not talking about 100 MB/s, which would be a Gigabit connection, but is still very not normal). What could be normal is a potential server outage and/or a surplus of users downloading from a particular server, all at once.

... when the files are only a few KB. The last patch for example had ~12k files at an average of 102 KB each and 4k of them were less than 10 KB each.

You can see this problem on you own hard drive when trying to copy hundreds of smaller files vs an equivalent big one. The time it takes to process each file is longer than the data transfer, so it takes much longer to deal with. It's simply not possible to download at high speeds when the files are small. Like I said, if you want to see what the server's top speed is, you need a bigger sample, so try downloading Gw2-64.exe (32 MB) first. There's no point in trying other servers if it's not actually slow.

If you want to sample what patching is like from your very own asset server, you can try my launcher, which has a lot of built-in tools. It can automatically select the best server available to you and can download patches outside of GW2, allowing GW2 to patch directly from your hard drive (tools > asset proxy / background patching).

@Healix.5819 said:

@Saiyan.1704 said:500 KB/s is

NOT Normal

when his internet service provider offers 100 Mbps (assuming he's not talking about 100 MB/s, which would be a Gigabit connection, but is still very not normal). What could be normal is a potential server outage and/or a surplus of users downloading from a particular server, all at once.

Maybe i'm missing something here because I have never seen a kb/s when downloading an .exe file. (I redownloaded GW2.exe from GW2 website). Even then I'm still downloading the file at MB/s, it took a seconds. I never once saw a kb/s anything, anywhere. Downloading at kb/s connection will literally take days to complete... so maybe we're talking about two different things here?

I was assuming the OP was talking about downloading the actual game patch as oppose to the .exe game client... @Mister Ch.7854 hasn't updated us on the exact issue he's experiencing.

@Saiyan.1704 said:

@Healix.5819 said:

@Saiyan.1704 said:500 KB/s is

NOT Normal

when his internet service provider offers 100 Mbps (assuming he's not talking about 100 MB/s, which would be a Gigabit connection, but is still very not normal). What could be normal is a potential server outage and/or a surplus of users downloading from a particular server, all at once.

.exes are a single file, and as such you would download that faster. It's why he suggested checking how quickly they downloaded that, if it downloaded quickly the issue isn't a connection problem. If you watch your download speed when you download patches or the game you would see it jump up and down a lot, and look at the file number count and you'll see that when you're downloading at peak the file count drops slowly, but when you're download speed drops the file count drops quicker. This is actually very normal, partly due to how we receive data over the internet, it is not optimized for quick small bits of data, it's actually why online games suffer a lot when things go bad, as they are about small frequent bits.

@"Saiyan.1704" said:Maybe i'm missing something here because I have never seen a kb/s when downloading an .exe file. (I redownloaded GW2.exe from GW2 website). Even then I'm still downloading the file at MB/s, it took a seconds. I never once saw a kb/s anything, anywhere. Downloading at kb/s connection will literally take days to complete... so maybe we're talking about two different things here?

The exe is 32 MB, which is why I was using it as a test and why you've never seen it download in the KB/s range. Now if you tried downloading 1000 1 KB files, although that's only 1 MB, it'd take you much longer than a single 32 MB file. Zip up those 1000 files however, which is generally how other MMOs do patches, and you'll once again download at your normal speed.

Normal patches are composed of thousands of files, with the full game being close to 500k total, all of which are downloaded and processed individually. These files can range from being 1 KB to 100 MB in size. When the game is downloading hundreds of 1 KB files in a row, you'll notice your speed drop into the KB/s range because it takes longer to actually make the requests and process them than it does to download. For normal patches, you may only notice this happen for a few seconds, but when this does happen, you should notice the file count going down much quicker. When downloading the full game, there may be strings of thousands of smaller files at a time, so you may see this happen much more regularly. There is a little randomness involved however, since GW2 downloads around 10 files at a time and all it takes is 1 large file to show your normal speed.

-

In short, when complaining about the download speed, first see what your top speed to the server is. Take the second number from here, which is currently 1961789, and see the below link. Unlike the one GW2 offers you normally, this is Gw2-64.exe direct from the patch server:http://assetcdn.101.arenanetworks.com/program/101/1/0/1961789

If it's not actually slow, there's no point in trying other servers, because you're likely downloading a string of smaller files which is limiting your speed. There are of course other problems that may be occurring, like security software scanning what GW2 is downloading, slowing it down even further, or software hooked into the network protocols, which GW2 doesn't usually like and causes it to crash.

I'm experiencing slow download and processing speeds as well. I have a gigabit connection and normally pull games (many filed as this thread says) @ 60-80 MB/s

Despite what a lot of people in this thread are saying, 500 KB/s is absolutely not acceptable. For me I'm getting either 0kb-7MB/s mostly between 0-2MB/s. This is either a problem with GW2's data processing after the file hits your machine, most people have SSD's now, there's absolutely no way the downloader is writing data to disk that slow it should be flying through, and if that's the case, woo boy do we have optimization and other code health issues on their side. Or its really is bad CDN placement/No CDN, or they have the game client files hosted on a low priority slow connection.

im also having a major problem trying to re download the game I also have gig speed network I re started my modem and everything the problem is not witin my internet

ok now I have been trying to re download this game since last night this will soon be 24 hours and I know for a fact that this is in no way normal. Please someone explain to me what is going on I was thinking of buying the path of fire expansion and really getting into gw2 again but this download thing really has me thinking otherwise

@ragemere.3260 said:Please someone explain to me what is going on

There is currently a problem with some of the servers, causing GW2 to get stuck downloading the same files over and over. There are other potential causes for it being slow/stuck, but this is currently the common one.

If this is your problem, you can simply launch with the following:-assetsrv 54.84.216.160

However, note that this is the main server in the US, so it will be slower, especially depending on your location. You'll only need to use this to get around parts where you're having problems.

@Healix.5819 said:

@ragemere.3260 said:Please someone explain to me what is going on

ok how would I insert this and use it?

@ragemere.3260 said:

@Healix.5819 said:

@ragemere.3260 said:Please someone explain to me what is going on

ok never mind I got that figured out and so far things are going well if there is anymore trouble I will certainly let you know thanks so much

I am having this same issue. The weird thing is that yesterday night it took me longer than it should to download the installer from the website but being small it wasn't much of a big deal, yet I noticed the unusual slow speed. Then I went on to patch/download the whole game from the pathcer and it was really fast, I have a 1GB fiber optics line. But I had to go to bed so I stopped it. Started it again this morning and it's crawling. I can see the download speed raise and fall every 10 seconds. 20 mb/s! 20 kb/s... and so on. After 20 minutes I am still at 0% (ZERO) downloaded, and a whopping total of 5 MB downloaded.

This is really strange. I read the above messages but I am not sure if a solution is offered. I understand that I can check my speed towards some addresses, but any chance I can force my connection to link to one of the fast one (like, I suppose, the one I caught last night that was normally fast) instead of the broken ones?

Thanks. At the moment, I can't get back in the game.

@falconeer.8237 said:any chance I can force my connection to link to one of the fast one (like, I suppose, the one I caught last night that was normally fast) instead of the broken ones?

You can manually select a server by using the -assetsrv option. Optimally you'd want to find the best server for you, but the simpler option is to use the main server just to get past where it's having problems, since chances are all of your local servers are affected.

To use the main server, launch with the following option:

-assetsrv 54.84.216.160

To find your own, open cmd.exe and enter:

nslookup assetcdn.101.arenanetworks.comnslookup assetcdn.101.arenanetworks.com 8.8.8.8nslookup assetcdn.101.arenanetworks.com 1.1.1.1

Thank you very much Healix. What's proving confusing here on top of everything else is the fact that it looks like the download restarts from zero every time I stop it. Would you know where the partially downloaded is being stored while it comes down, so I can monitor it?

Well, it worked and I am finally in. Thanks a lot!

It is stored were ever you put your gw2.exe file to start said download.

@falconeer.8237 said:Thank you very much Healix. What's proving confusing here on top of everything else is the fact that it looks like the download restarts from zero every time I stop it. Would you know where the partially downloaded is being stored while it comes down, so I can monitor it?

The launcher will always show the percentage downloaded reset at 0 every time you stop it because it shows the percent of files downloaded for that session of use. To monitor progress, keep an eye on the number of files left to download.

@Healix.5819 said:

@falconeer.8237 said:any chance I can force my connection to link to one of the fast one (like, I suppose, the one I caught last night that was normally fast) instead of the broken ones?

And which ip do I select then? Currently using a wired network connection and I can't reach higher speeds than 2 mb/sec with huge intervals of 0 kb/s. Still stuck on over 50k of files after running a full night.

@Calena.4601 said:And which ip do I select then?

Any. You can only try them all to find one that works best for you.

The current major problem however is some servers have corrupted files. If you're affected by this, chances are the servers you're going to find will have the same problem. This is where you simply want to use the main server (-assetsrv 54.84.216.160) for as long as it takes to get past the files it's stuck on.

OK, thanks for that :)

It's funny, this is one of the oldest problems with this HORRIBLE and extremely poorly designed launcher from the developer... and they never cared about the tons of tickets, reports, about it, they just throw 'excuses' to customers because they never bothered to resolve this...