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Why? (Updater question)
Why does the updater appear to be capped at 8k/s? Every time I've updated using DSL, i can download updates no faster than 8k/s. Why?
The individual connections shouldn't be capped at all. There's an overall bandwidth cap, so if the cap is fully utilized, it will queue connections. But, I think you can use up to 5mbit. I recently downloaded and installed Vendetta (via the updater, of course) on a friend's machine, and I pulled it all down and installed it in a couple of minutes. I didn't look at my rates, but it was sure faster than 8k/s.
A given provider can have less-than-ideal connectivity to certain parts of the Internet. For instance, a peering point can be heavily utilized and not have sufficient bandwidth. This is pretty common for ISPs that don't have diverse enough connectivity. So while you may be able to download at 150k/s from <enter site here> that rides one connection, you may get terrible rates from <enter other site> that takes a route through some over-utilized piece of ethernet at Mae-East or some such. The command "traceroute" (tracert in windows) can help illustrate these issues, sometimes.
It's also noteworthy that there are two update servers on two completely different networks. Your connections to them are round-robin load balanced via DNS. So, there's a 50-50 chance you'll get one network or the other. You may be able to retry the connection and get the other server, it depends on your DNS resolver library, OS, and other variables.
A given provider can have less-than-ideal connectivity to certain parts of the Internet. For instance, a peering point can be heavily utilized and not have sufficient bandwidth. This is pretty common for ISPs that don't have diverse enough connectivity. So while you may be able to download at 150k/s from <enter site here> that rides one connection, you may get terrible rates from <enter other site> that takes a route through some over-utilized piece of ethernet at Mae-East or some such. The command "traceroute" (tracert in windows) can help illustrate these issues, sometimes.
It's also noteworthy that there are two update servers on two completely different networks. Your connections to them are round-robin load balanced via DNS. So, there's a 50-50 chance you'll get one network or the other. You may be able to retry the connection and get the other server, it depends on your DNS resolver library, OS, and other variables.
probably my PoS DSL provider's falt.
Who provides your DSL? And I thought you were stuck with dialup...
I have a similar problem on my school's T3. It started happening after 3.11+
MGWnet is my provider.
Me too, i have a 6Mbit connection, but it takes nearly a half-hour to download the game....?
Could the ISP have instituted throttling for P2P and inadvertently capped Vendetta, since it's a largely unknown protocol?
Yes, actually, we've run into rate-shaping on some college networks. Several schools use Packeteer boxes to rate-shape P2P filesharing protocols and such, and have pretty fascist restrictions on any "unknown" protocols. I talked to Packeteer earlier this year and provided them with specifics on our protocol implementation, which they then added to their known-protocol profiles. This doesn't mean that schools (or ISPs) won't choose to rate-shape it, but it at least means it's a protocol known to the machine. It should be available in the latest version of the Packeteer OS, but I'm not sure if that's been released yet, or if so, how many people will choose to update. Given the speed with which new P2P networks emerge, one would hope people will update their protocol profiles fairly often. Of course, not everyone uses Packeteer, there are several open-source options and the like, but Packeteer is by far the most prevalent right now.
So thats why my updates used to be very slow, but are speedy now...