Not really.
There are only about 10,000 reasons downloads for MSFS can stink and only a very few involve MS/Asobo.
For one, there are a number of ISPs that deliberately throttle MMO type games, including MSFS.
Throwing this at Asobo’s feet is both patently unfair and very likely absolutely wrong.
Eliminate all other possibilities before blaming Asobo.
If you look outside of “it’s Asobo’s fault” and look for other solutions, you might just improve things.
I have eliminated everything else the other times. you have a right to your opinion. Mine is that it’s Asobo as always.
Then why do I have this issue ONLY on MSFS and not any other games.
I am downloading at like 10% of my normal speed, there is something wrong on Asobo’s side.
If I, (or anyone else), here absolutely knew the answer to that, I, (we), would have an office somewhere in NYC and would be making tons of money.
However, there are possibilities:
Server saturation at a particular download endpoint.
Congestion on the leg that the server is on.
Congestion on a part of the internet leading to the download servers that is outside Microsoft’s control. (Like the reports of bad/overloaded hardware in the NE legs of the Internet’s backbone providers.)
Restrictive ISP providers that could be throttling Microsoft’s traffic at your end of the pipe.
Restrictive national and/or regional firewalls.
Restrictions imposed by your own network’s hardware/software that don’t handle MS’s particular packet sizes or delayed ACK for packets received.
The setting for the server location within MSFS itself.
There may be other possibilities that I have not included.
You folks can believe what you will, but you should try to keep an open mind, just in case some of these ideas can improve your speeds.
I’m seeing this today and perhaps for this last week. Sim update (AAU2) downloads fine at normal speed (I only have slow fibre 30MBits/sec) , but in market place/content manager over last week the downloads start off really slow for many minutes at 2-3MBits/sec, then mysteriously jump up to normal 30MBits/sec. Not sure what’s going on.
I’ve not actually tried this, but for the sake of evidence I may do.
The only ways they could throttle the traffic to/from MSFS is if they can identify it. Either the IP source, IP destination, protocols in use or the content itself.
IP source is unlikely, IP destination possibly, the protocol is probably HTTPS but I would need to run packet traces to confirm this. If the ISP were throttling the content, to see inside the HTTPS packets they would need to do HTTPS inspection, and to do that they need to be able to decrypt the traffic in transit. Essentially a man in the middle attack.
I know this because we do this at work with our Check Point firewalls. It’s the only way that the firewall can peak inside a packet to see if it is a threat. We deploy a certificate to all our clients. This cert. is used by the browser on a client, and the firewall uses that certificate to decrypt the packet, inspect it, and if clear, sent on its way but now using the websites certificate. The website doesn’t know it has happened, and the client doesn’t know either. Only the firewall knows, hence man in the middle.
It’s doubtful the ISP has any way of decrypting the traffic to/from MSFS, so all they see is HTTPS traffic to/from a residential address to a Azure address, presumably. The outside of the envelope, in effect.
I’ll fire up Wireshark later, and download some content from the Marketplace, and see what it looks like.
Evidence is always valuable.
Yes, I’m pretty sure it just uses good old HTTPS for transport. Here I set up a display filter to only show traffic leaving my IP, cleared the trace, then hit the install button for the KTEX airport in the “My Content” page:
You an see my source port of 62874, and the destination port of 443.
I repeated this for another uninstalled purchase, the Carenado Arrow. You can see the conversation get set up, the “Client Hello”, and the key exchange.
Client Hello indicates what ciphers the client supports.
Changing the display filter slightly, to only show packets to/from “40.90.65.55”, we see the corresponding “Server Hello”.
Digging in to that packet, we find this:
A cipher suite has been chosen for this conversation. This all looks like bog standard HTTPS traffic.
I didn’t see any resets, or anything error handling going on, just frequent TCP window size updates…but expert shows otherwise.
Nothing for us to worry about, but maybe things for the engineers to look at , like the massive number of “Ignored Unkown Record” packets.
Finally, just to confirm the IP identity:
It definitely is http to a Microsoft owned localised CDN endpoint. I recently built a new PC and it took nearly 24h to download the sim from the xbox game app, and all of my addons from the sim. It was running around 10-20% of my normal download speed.
This was really frustrating and I had plenty of time to investigate it live. I found the connections and in my case it was to an Australian based MS content server over https, with a 20ms round trip which is pretty typical given this is a large country. The marketplace in sim was using the same end point that the xbox game app used.
I got Wireshark on it and it’s clear from the flow that the server was just not sending data fast enough. I tried a bunch of tweaks I could think of, including switching to different congestion algos to see if I could unstick it but no joy. It just wasn’t going to go faster than it wanted to.
I did put a VPN on it and found it running several times faster when connected to the USA, which is daft when I’m in Australia. However that slowed down as well when the planet rotated some.
I know it’s not my ISP traffic shaping for several reasons, including that through the VPN was slow with local exit points.
For sure there can be several causes of slow downloads and it’s impossible to work out the root cause without investigating each case, but for me the local CDN is clearly substantially underperforming. The whole point of a CDN is to localise and speed up transfers, and in my case it was just a total bottleneck. I bet this is not an uncommon case as many others with otherwise good connections have reported similar poor performance.
Very similar things happened on Nvidia GeForce NOW cloud gaming. So many users and some regions got throttled for months, everyone thought it was ISPs but when users compared log files they realized it was not maybe isps. https://imgur.com/a/0fTrn35 / Imgur: The magic of the Internet / Imgur: The magic of the Internet
I am not saying MS also doing the same things here. On GeForce NOW people were saying some kind of qos traffic shaping going on which resulted below 7 9mbps and horrible packet loss rendering GeForceNow unusable for a lot of paid customers.
2-3mbits is really not normal for msfs to download addons in content manager. What if we get the same 2 3mbits while flying?
Exacttly the same issue here. 500GBit up/down and getting between 20 and 60Mbit/s today. This was like 200 earlier.
Restarted MSFS, restarted download, it now was 2-3MBit/s… ouch.
After a few minutes it became 150MBit/s: happy…
But 30 secs later it became 2MBit/s again…
Up to 60 for a while and then down to 2 again…
Ran speedtest.nl: 722Mbit up, 299Mbit down…
So not happy with MP tonight. They seem to have issues at the moment.
Same issues here, on series x content manager download speeds are around 0.30mbits/s sometimes it jumps to 2-3mbits/s.
Trying to install the new city update.
Downloads were very fast for me recently, not sure if the latest AAU update caused this or it’s some server problem.
Update/
Cancelled the download, changed my server which was set to automatic Europe, to East USA, went back and tried download again and it’s jumped to 30-50mbits/s
No idea if switching server was what helped or not but it did the trick.
Forgot to mention that I tried this. Switched from East Asia (community fly-in) to West europe, but this did nothing.
Secondly: I can’t purchase anything since yesterday. Get a message that something went wrong and sometime later that the purchase was canceled…
All that does is change your MP server, changing who you see in the world.
You could try shutting the sim down, running the XBox app, logging out of the XBox network, then logging back in again.
Did that just a minute ago, no change.
Do you have issues with free addons from the Marketplace?
same here. after starting to download a new package it sat at 2-3 mbit. then went up to 80-90 (100mbit connection) and dropped to 2-3 again after like 40 seconds…
Nope. Downloaded the Trimotor yesterday, and the Citation Longitude Enhanced from WT just now.
Changed Billing method to Paypal in stead of Ideal billing agreement on my own bank account. That did the trick for me.
I saw the same pattern a couple of days ago downloading CU2. Download would stick at 2Mbps for a period, then ramp up to a much higher peak (I’m on a 1Gbps symmetric connection) for a bit, then back to 2Mbps again for a while, and so on.
This absolutely reeks of throttling at the CDN end. My ISP does no shaping on any traffic (this is one of their selling points) and I can saturate my bandwidth over HTTPS on any endpoint and route that can keep up.
i somehow tied this to fsexpo, increased server load and whatnot… But i´m no expert…
