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Why PS4 downloads are so slow (testing and answers within)

SpotAnime

Member
I just tried this, and its not the case for me. I started Uncharted 4 (probably one of the most intense game regarding hardware usage), then i went to the PS Store and started a download. I got max download speed (4MB/s). Then i started playing Uncharted 4, and went back to check on the download, still doing max speed.

Do you have a regular PS4 or a Pro?
 

angelic

Banned
My ps4 wifi + fibre is as fast as I need...4gb updates coming down in 5-10 minutes when in standby, but that would take an hour if watched.
 

Diablos

Member
I know the CPU is lackluster to say the least, but it's seriously not powerful enough to handle a simple background download at full speed? That's very surprising.

PSN overhaul is desperately needed but hardware limitations that severe may prove difficult to remedy...
 

sujay

Member
I know the CPU is lackluster to say the least, but it's seriously not powerful enough to handle a simple background download at full speed? That's very surprising.

PSN overhaul is desperately needed but hardware limitations that severe may prove difficult to remedy...

"There's an alternate theory that this is due to some non-network resource constraints (e.g. CPU, memory, disk). I don't think that works. If the CPU or disk were the constraint, just having the appropriate priorities in place would automatically take care of this. If the download process gets starved of CPU or disk bandwidth due to a low priority, the receive buffer would fill up and the receive window would scale down dynamically, exactly when needed. And the amounts of RAM we're talking about here are miniscule on a machine with 8GB of RAM; less than a megabyte."

the conclusion of the analysis is that it is 100% an artificial limitation, seemingly to avoid having background downloads compete with latency-sensitive games or mess up video streaming, but the implementation is very poor.

---

anyone tried posting this to the firmware 5.00 beta forums since that's one of the rare places we can get things in front of actual firmware devs?
 

magawolaz

Member
Not really a problem for me because I have a slow adsl and I only download stuff in sleep mode... But doesn't the PS4 have a secondary processor that should take care of downloads and all that stuff?
 

clintar

Member
If these theories are correct, why do some not have problems with slow speeds?
How far away you are from servers makes a difference with the technique they use to throttle, plus they probably aren't running background apps it playing games while they download.
 
Where are you guys seeing your actual download rate at? o.0

I can see the connection test speed to PSN itself but I've never saw a way to show the download rate on an actual download -_-

My 100Mbps fiber usually gets 90-95Mbps on the speed test but no idea what my downloads actually average unless I manually do the math. I mean, it must be close cuz it's usually about 10 gigs per 15 minutes but the PS4 download UI just shows downloaded/total not the speed.
 

alexbull_uk

Member
My download and upload speed are both messed up on PS4. I get 7 MB download speed on a 60 MB connection, and my 10 MB upload speed comes out less than 1MB on PS4. I get connection speed warnings and everything when playing games even though the system reports signal strength as 100%. Something is definitely weird with PS4s at least for me.

If your connection is advertised as 60Mb then 7MB/s is pretty much spot-on. Same goes for your upload.
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Haven't noticed this issue TBH, I seem to get flat 8/10 MB/s regardless of if anything is running or not.
 

chaosaeon

Member
My download and upload speed are both messed up on PS4. I get 7 MB download speed on a 60 MB connection, and my 10 MB upload speed comes out less than 1MB on PS4. I get connection speed warnings and everything when playing games even though the system reports signal strength as 100%. Something is definitely weird with PS4s at least for me.

If your connection is advertised as 60Mb then 7MB/s is pretty much spot-on. Same goes for your upload.

Wow really ? What's the breakdown of how that happens ?
 

bitbydeath

Gold Member
Downloaded Uncharted Lost Legacy and Jak and Daxter in approx 3 hours.

That's over 50gb worth so happy with those results.
 

down 2 orth

Member
No, the issue is that the OS is artificially kneecapping its network connection to PSN servers whenever anything is running, apparently out of a wildly over conservative desire to avoid starving any other game or app of resources (which makes sense on paper, but a 7K receive window cap is absurdly silly).

Edit: to be clear, it's 100% an OS software issue, 100% fixable simply by changing whatever code in the UI reacts to application launches by choosing to clamp the network socket's receive window to the size of a thimble.

Maybe... this is by design?

They're trying to use less network resources while people are distracted?

I was thinking the same thing, but would they really save so much money that it would be worth pissing off so many customers?
 
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