How can i improve update download speeds

Hi guys, As i was away for the weekend I'm a little bit behind the bell curve downloading 2., However for some reason I'm only downloading at 200 KB/s, yet my line speedtest is showing a download speed of 66 Mb/s

anyone got any idea how I can improve this, If I switch to HTTP, it goes up to 1mb but that's still significantly slower than I should be getting.

Cowboy10UK

It's ok scratch this, cleaned out the update data in CMD and restarted now getting 8 MB/s which works out about right for 66Mbs connection.

Mods you can lock or delete this thread guys.

Thanks for your help.

Cowboy10uk

This may not be directly related to the internet speeds, but it adds time to the update process, the updater actually does one imo unnecessary step, instead of unpacking into the installation, it first unpacks, then copies, same stuff being transferred twice.

I should have also noted that in a bug thread, but here's where I figured out about this, while having another idea:

https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=187283

No. It unpacks and then hardlinks. Nothing is transferred twice. That's why _downloads is inside the install folder - to be on the same disk.

But the "install" process is taking quite long, after the unpack process. I think I have seen in procmon that it reads and writes.

Not sure what do you meant with "hardlink". If it was a hardlink it would be instantaneous.

Why is "hardlink" as you say needed at all? Why can't it unpack straight into the installation? The installation process has no extra steps content-wise, I have tested and moved the data myself manually after unpacking process, skipping the install process, and I can play normally, except the updater stays broken.

unless you installed DCS into FAT32 which can't do hardlinks.

I've made a hardlink to another disk drive, I think download works, but not the install process, the updater doesn't support that, for some reason it knows it's a hardlink from another disk, throws out error, if that could be fixed then my idea would work without the updater knowing I'm using alternate locations and I wouldn't be asking for such a feature to be supported in GUI and officially, since manual hardlinks don't work, there's no options left.

I still don't understand your context of "hardlink". This manual hardlink utility also shows any other hardlinks of many types in the windows explorer using a special Icon, I never see any such icon inside the _downloads folder or the _downloads folder it self, if there was hardlinks I would have seen them wouldn't I? I don't see any junctions, sym links, or anything.

What if the download process fails? You want to be left with a non-working game?

The install process starts after the unpacking process, and the unpacking process starts after the download had to be successfully finished. I have no problem with the download process. The active download in progress is suppose to be separated away from the installation.

I'm not saying that it downloads directly into the install, there's 3 steps. I'm saying that the unpacking process unpacks directly into the installation, and not into a different subfolder in _downloads folder. Currently it works like after it's done unpacking it's copying all the unpacked data, for whatever reason (confirmed none), and this is quite interesting, if it was a move operation, it would be instantaneous as only NTFS metadata has to be shifted around on the same disk drive, however with a copy-operation there's always going to be a full blown read-write.

So if there is some extra operation in the installation, like some other updater misc stuff, then no need to mess with the updater code that much, simply make the install process to use a move-operation, the OS will handle it and it'll be much faster.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365006(v=vs.85).aspx

 

Quote: A hard link is the file system representation of a file by which more than one path references a single file in the same volume.

Okay so we're talking about the same thing, you say the updater uses NTFS hardlinks, well firstly I do not see any evidence of that, secondly the time it takes for the final process is similar to the unpacking process.

1. The downloading process takes around 15-20 minutes fresh install
   
2. Then another +20 mins for "unpacking"
   
3. And another 20 mins for "installing" (copying inside same disk drive, extremely weird)
   

At which point these supposable hardlinks do any help?

If the updater unpacked straight into the installation instead of the

If there's some technical barriers preventing that, which as a non-dev I cannot imagine at this point, then that's okay, so I suggested that this can be mitigated by supporting a custom temporary location for the download and unpacking process, so the updater would download to some location on Disk1, Unpack from Disk1 to Disk2 (if CPU fast enough maxing out the Disk1 read speeds, depends), and then moving the unpacked stuff on Disk2 to Disk3 where the game installation would be, if Disk3 is same or better than Disk2, Disk2 could read at max speed and everything combined if that would mean that both the unpacking and installation processes would be 50% shorter for everyone, on any storage device.

Something is wrong with your system.

Allright I'm going to do it all over again, but I'm talking about how it is before 2.1 - if you were having 2.1 in mind then I think it should be mentioned ...

Something is wrong with your system.

Allright, it wasn't really 20mins in my case, total was about 3 hours because download speeds weren't as fast as it could go on my connection.

But the unpacking and installing both took about an hour, well over 20 minutes that I have estimated off my head.

The Hard Drive is Western Digital WD10EZEX Caviar Blue 1000 GB 64MB (these never blues are identical to blacks, only warranty difference, check reviews)

OS is Windows 7 x64 Ultimate.

DCS World Alpha 2.1 Updater Analysis

6 Videos of Highlights

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Now you can see the install process is essentially "moving" but actually copying the files from Install-Root\_downloads to Install-Root. It's a bit weird how this happens and it took me some time (7 minute mark) to figure out it's using CreateFile operation with Read or Write parameter, after it's done with a file it deletes it, so it's more of a cleanup command, not a real move command.

If I moved this using the Windows GUI it would have taken a fraction of the time. I did exactly that in the previous case a few weeks ago, the game worked fine, only the updater was broken, because there's a small procedure that happens at the end of the installation to sync up the updater.

My idea is that the Unpacking and Installing process be combined, the updater would do what it needs to do when It's unpacking and it would at the same time directly install into the Install-Root path. Whould have saved about an hour in this almost 3 hour thing, in this case.

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You can see in the FINISHING video at the 2:15 minute mark, the autoupdate.dat entries, those are the steps that happen at the end so the updater is synced up properly, that's why my previous manual-move was working game-wise, but the updater was broken for good and stuck in a loop.

The important thing is, the game worked when I forcefully moved the unpacked files myself (not in these videos), there is no any technical requirement why the unpack cannot go directly into the installation as far as the game content is concerned, the only additional step that happens in the Install process is the updater's sync and other misc stuff, this can be reimplemented into the Unpacking procedure and essentially merging both the Unpacking and Installation into one, if this cannot be done because of some other technical reason then I would really love to have an option to be able to set custom downloads folder and a custom unpack folder on different disk drives.

PS: A checkbutton not to launch the game after successful update would also be handy, I think half the time I'm not intending to actually go inside the game.