Download speed is very slow (less than 1MB/s, mostly hovering around 300-500KB/s)

[Nicholas Steel.2340]

- I temporarily boosted my internet connection from 100/20 Mbps to 250/25 Mbps.
- I rapidly download Genshin Impact at 30MB/s, demonstrating the internet connection had been boosted. It rook around 40 minutes to download 80GB.
- I Struggle to get more than 1MB/s when updating Guild Wars 2. Based on how slowly the progress bar is filling up it feels like it's going to take *days* to update 109,000 files of which any of them could be any data size

(Launcher *still* doesn't adequately inform you of how long a download will take, "files" is a useless metric when it comes to indicating download progress).

Edited October 7, 2023 by Nicholas Steel.2340

[Healix.5819]

GW2 downloads individual files that can range from 1 byte to 100 MB; most are < 10 KB. It's simply not possible to reach higher speeds when it's downloading small files, so watch for the file count to rapidly decrease instead. When it does reach higher speeds, you'll notice the file count will slow down. If both are slow, then you have a problem.

You can test your speed by downloading a larger file from the patch server. Here's Gw2-64.exe (38 MB):

http://assetcdn.101.arenanetworks.com/program/101/1/0/3171114

The size of what GW2 downloads is unknown and will vary in size, so they'll never show an accurate estimation.

You can force GW2 to download (3x) more files at a time by launching with the option:

-patchconnections 24

[Nicholas Steel.2340]

That sounds like an incredibly bad way to handle downloads if it results in sub 1MB/s speed with the game on an SSD. Meanwhile Path of Exile, Diablo III, Everything on Steam/GOG, etc. download at high speed. I tried the command you mentioned and it yielded no improvement: "G:\Guild Wars 2\Gw2-64.exe" -patchconnections 24

Also every other service manages to show total download size and/or estimated time to completion, even Torrents manage this and they explicitly deal with downloading individual files separately across multiple connections.

Edited October 7, 2023 by Nicholas Steel.2340

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

44 minutes ago, Nicholas Steel.2340 said:

That sounds like an incredibly bad way to handle downloads if it results in sub 1MB/s speed with the game on an SSD. Meanwhile Path of Exile, Diablo III, Everything on Steam/GOG, etc. download at high speed. I tried the command you mentioned and it yielded no improvement: "G:\Guild Wars 2\Gw2-64.exe" -patchconnections 24

Also every other service manages to show total download size and/or estimated time to completion, even Torrents manage this and they explicitly deal with downloading individual files separately across multiple connections.

this is an mmo which means it has to incrementally patch all files, because players can be on one of tens of thousands of different versions from the last ten years, and need to be able to directly patch the game regardless of what version they're on.

 

some of the games you mentioned used peer-to-peer patching (bittorrent-like), built into an official launcher, which is a completely different beast since the developers don't have to worry about hosting literally hundreds of terabytes of data from all the different versions on their servers.

 

this is also why it can't show you an accurate reading of the download.

Edited October 7, 2023 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[Chaba.5410]

6 hours ago, Nicholas Steel.2340 said:

That sounds like an incredibly bad way to handle downloads if it results in sub 1MB/s speed with the game on an SSD. Meanwhile Path of Exile, Diablo III, Everything on Steam/GOG, etc. download at high speed. I tried the command you mentioned and it yielded no improvement: "G:\Guild Wars 2\Gw2-64.exe" -patchconnections 24

Also every other service manages to show total download size and/or estimated time to completion, even Torrents manage this and they explicitly deal with downloading individual files separately across multiple connections.

It's just perspective, not good nor bad.  GW2 has the client figure out which files it needs to patch and then request them individually.  Some other games make the patching server figure out which files the client needs and then package them up into a blob.

[Healix.5819]

6 hours ago, Nicholas Steel.2340 said:

Also every other service manages to show total download size and/or estimated time to completion, even Torrents manage this and they explicitly deal with downloading individual files separately across multiple connections.

They can show the total size because it doesn't change. When GW2 downloads files, it first checks if it can patch an existing file, if not, it tries to download a compressed version of the file, and if that's not available, it downloads the raw file.

GW2 does know the total size of what it needs, but the problem is patching existing files, which is completely unknown and can drastically change the size. GW2 is unique in that they can patch a file from any prior version, which they dynamically create on request. They could simply show the total remaining size, but it would be just as meaningless as the file count unless you used -nodelta to force GW2 to only download full files.

[Nicholas Steel.2340]

On 10/8/2023 at 3:30 AM, Chaba.5410 said:

It's just perspective, not good nor bad.  GW2 has the client figure out which files it needs to patch and then request them individually.  Some other games make the patching server figure out which files the client needs and then package them up into a blob.

The latter is what Path of Exile does, I image most of the games I mentioned do this. You'll see a "Validating files" or some such step before the download begins and then the download will rocket along as fast as your internet/the server can handle with it finally beginning the patching process when the download of all data completes.

Guild Wars 2 seems to be checking one file, determining if it can be differentially patched or need a complete replacement, downloads the relevant data, patches the file and then moves on to the next file to repeat the process, a process that is waaaaaaay slower than it needs to be.

Edited October 9, 2023 by Nicholas Steel.2340