Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?
Yes
Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:
The problem can sometimes be mitigated by connecting to a different country via VPN. Today I was first connected to a German ISP with about 2-3Mbit/s (while receiving full 250MBit/s downloads on other sites). When I switched to a London-based VPN server my download rates improved to an average of about 130MBit/s. The actual download speed was fluctuating between an occasional 30MBit low and 180MBit max.
If relevant, provide additional screenshots/video:
Your mileage may vary on that one. I’ve been using the sim since release, and I have never seen it go over about 250Mbps. Currently I have 1Gbps broadband, and since that upgrade I’ve only ever seen it get to about ~200Mbps, and even then that’s for very brief periods. 99.9% of the time it sits in the 2-3Mbps range, for long periods of time.
You may want to check the speed in Windows task manager. MSFS progress bar averages speeds from the last 10-20 seconds so it may not even catch the short bursts of activity.
I’ve measured it with both my firewall’s management tool, and using Windows PerfMon.
What I see are islands of activity, and then prolonged lulls where there is around 2Mbps throughput.
The sim for sure catches bursts of “speed” quicker than 10-20 seconds, though not as responsive as external tools.
It’s quite clear the downloads are hitting some QoS threshold, or other traffic management limit. The reason they haven’t fixed it is it is most likely by design, and there is probably not a lot the MSFS team can do to change this. Those that are responsible probably looked at the evidence, saw the potentially hundreds of thousands of users coming in on patch days, and decided this was the only way to give everyone a fair shake of the stick.
They might be applying these measures across the board, which is why we see pretty dreadful performance even on non-patch days.
By comparison, I downloaded Enshrouded from Steam at a leisurely 890Mbps, so in the background I could have downloaded from MSFS, and not even noticed a performance drop.
It is for 4 days in a row now, slow. But like 2Mb/s only. While I have an 8Gbs/s fiber at home connected via cat7a cable. Anyway, i see the complaint also on Facebook etc around. Seems to be an issue in Europe at least. When I use my VPN to connect via America, for example. It is fast, like amazing fast. But back to Europe, slow again.
Sad thing, because I just upgraded my PC with the 4090 card and a Samsung 990 4TB m.2 SSD.
No fly time for now.
Btw, speed test and other services and website’s do work well as expected.
Note that Microsoft and Xbox seem to have some DNS oddities where they list multiple IPv4 and multiple IPv6 addresses for each domain, and sometimes you get routed through Amsterdam or Sydney, Australia between Portland and Seattle.
I don’t know for sure if this is what’s affecting peoples’ downloads, but if it’s downloading one file at a time, or one chunk of a file at a time, and reconnecting, it might be sometimes changing which IP address it comes up with and sending some of your downloads through Sydney where they’re getting bottlenecked on bandwidth.
I’m on a very stable 500/500 Mbit/s connection in a large Swedish city, but still MSFS insists on about 2 Mbit/s downloads… Occasionally, the speed goes up to perhaps 300 Mbit/sec for a second or so, but it very soon drops back to 2 Mbit/s again. This has been an issue for seven months now.
I’m also experiencing incredibly slow download speeds in MSFS. I attempted to update two of my planes via the content manager and my download speed stayed around 1.5Mbps.
I’m in Australia.
Internet for things other than MSFS is perfectly fine at 70+Mbps. Until this issue started happening I would typically get those types of speeds in MSFS.
This type of issue has me concerned for what an MSFS 2024 experience might look like.
Yes, same here! Have a 1Gbit connection and i spent fully two weeks to download 54 Gbyte files via the content manager.
Most of the time is a rate between 0-3,5 MBit.
I live in Germany.
( after i shut it down and re-download the update , it was ready in minutes instead of hours )