Asobo can’t fix this as its almost certainly not an issue with the client. There was a post/video by Jorg where he explained some things done to improve things going forward, at that time. He explained that users were stuck trying to download SU14(?), and were getting massive pauses. The “fix” was to instead of allowing the sim to download updates with all 8 connections at once, it would only download 1 at a time. So 1/8th the bandwidth.
I’ll see if I can dig out that video, but it was presumably one of the dev. updates, and I think there was an official post on the forums as well that go into more detail, and coherence(!) than I have here.
Here we go:
To rectify the issue, PlayFab engineers made a fix to their servers such that they didn’t generate a new SAS token every few seconds for each file requested but instead only once every 15 minutes on each of their servers. On the Microsoft Flight Simulator side, our team reduced the number of downloads that could occur in parallel for each player from eight (8) to one (1) to relieve some of the pressure on the CDN. This meant that individual players would experience reduced download speeds but all requests could be processed successfully.
Instead of increasing capacity at the back end, no mean feat for sure as it’s not as simple as snapping you fingers to create additional bandwidth, our downloads were throttled to 1/8th to allow more users to get on to download the updates, then 8/8 was restored.
The problem here is that this doesn’t help for future updates unless they really do something to increase capacity on the server side. It also doesn’t explain the terrible download speeds many of us have in between these update releases, where the pressure on the CDN’s is reduced.
Read through the incident report, and you will come to realise that all the shenanigans going on are entirely server side. No client side fixes, just reducing capacity per client to allow more clients on.
It was a very interesting read, but also disturbing because of this line:
Now that normal service has been restored, we hope everyone is enjoying Sim Update 14.
I’m not sure how you would define normal service, but to me that doesn’t mean throttle all the downloads on patch day, then resetting that once most users are up to date. “Normal” needs to be improved, and only MS/Playfab can do that, not Asobo.