It’s the lack of any sort of file verficiation that bugs me - like you I had myriad crashes back to the desktop and just hope that it resumed properly and didn’t leave anything corrupt or half-updated. MS simply need to publish a list of file checksums (god forbid they might give us a utility) to give us some sort of peace of mind. I’ll see if the game behaves eratically before downloading 150GB +. What a mess.
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A tool similar to SFC for flight sim would be great. If a file doesn’t match what it’s supposed to be - redownload just that one file (preferably uncompressed since zipping/extracting seems to be introducing errors) and replace it.
Technically, that’s how it’s supposed to work. But it doesn’t work. And Microsobo seem convinced it’s a problem on the user’s end - either their computers, home network config, or blame it on throttling by the user’s ISP. No surprise there. They seem to take that stance with most problems they don’t experience themselves.
Oof. After capping my download speed to 10Mbs (averaging more like 6-7) as some people have suggested, I just had it loop on me after downloading about 13GB of compressed files (fs-base). It deleted the archive files as it extracted them, then promptly deleted the target folder & started again.
That’s one of their the problem is on your end “solutions” they offer. It does absolutely nothing to fix the issue. The whole ZenDesk help page is all assumptions that the issue is on the user’s end.
It is odd how it affects some users, and not others. There may be a nugget of truth in what they say, like a certain brand of router, or motherboard NIC that causes this. I’ve never seen the looping download myself, and never need to use any Netlimiter-like software.
I had no update speed issues for the first few months. From launch until early in 2021, I was happily downloading at 400+ Mbits (I have 1 Gbit fibre). Then in January, I suddenly couldn’t break 10 Mbits. Tried everything. Eventually, I even wiped my system and reinstalled Windows. It took 27 hours for me to download the sim at under 10 Mbits.
The came SU3 where they borked performance for everyone. When they issued the hotfix, they said there was network code optimization. Since that patch, I’ve been installing at 100+ Mbits. Nowhere near my actual potential, but a far cry from the sub-10 Mbit I had been getting.
So I truly believe it’s something in their network code causing this.
The worse is that this would be easily avoidable by just letting us download an installer OUTSIDE the sim instead - either pushed by MS Store / Steam, or direct download. But that’s not the mechanism they have in place. The mechanism is intended for Xbox.
Maybe once enough Xbox players complain about slow downloads they’ll actually do something about it.
AME Bro!!! 
The router can definitely be a weak link, and one piece of equipment where it is not wise to skimp if one does a lot of streaming. In another thread, a user stated that he was having major issues with download speed and file looping until he bypassed his router and connected it directly to his cable modem, at which time, download speed picked up dramatically.
The poster mentioned the brand of his router. I looked it up online, and it is a bargain basement model, retailing for about $49.
Two years ago, I dropped my cable TV service in favor of streaming all my video via Hulu Live, Netflix and Amazon prime. I retained high speed Internet only, which resulted in a savings of almost $149 per month. Since I have two HD TVs, and two computers, I purchased the very best router I could find - the Netgear RAXE500. It retails for $600, and has been worth every penny, as it specifically designed to reliably support multiple high-speed streams, as well as Tri-band 6E WiFi.
Using that router, and my 200MB cable modem (Spectrum), I have never had any issues initially downloading MSFS or any succeeding updates since release last year. SU5 downloaded in 95 minutes start to finish for the the main 40GB update and 47 minutes for the additional 20GB content. No file looping, and on the larger files, the speed was steady at about 130 to 170 MB.
Connecting a networked PC directly to a cable modem should (in theory) give the very fastest possible download speed, but doing do can be quite dangerous, as it will expose the computer to all sorts of possible attacks without the firewall and port filtering that a good router provides.
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If anyone does go down the route of connecting directly to their cable modem, ensure you turn on a software firewall first. Either the built-in Windows Defender, or a third party.
I don’t think it will solve the speed issues as that’s most likely a server side issue, but it would be an interesting test for those having the looping download issue. If it’s the motherboard NIC causing the problem this will make no difference.
One reason that I consistently have good download results with MSFS and updates may be that according to traceroute, there are only three intermediate hops between my ISP and the MSFS US East server.
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If you had a very unreliable route where lots of packet loss is occurring that could be an issue. It would be interesting to see the output from a packet trace from an affected user to see if there is a reason for the loops. Wireshark would provide those data.
Triggering game updates seems to be an issue on my PC at the moment - the xbox app didnt trigger and neither did a manual check for updates in the store app - the only thing that worked was visiting each game page in the store app. This was for the FS2020 update and also for The Ascent and several other game pass games - they only detected an update when visiting the store game page.
Asobo, is it possible to download and decompress the packages at the same time?
This stop and go process takes much of the whole install time.
That is what it does now downloads a bit then decompresses that bit and so on. Yes, I don’t know how much quicker the download would be with it down loading everything first then decompressing it. I do notice on some of the files that are quite large my download speed does slowly pick up speed but for lots of the small files, it hardly has time to pick up speed.
I’m using a Huawei 659 modem and my desktop computer is connected to it by Wi-Fi and the 40.29 GB update the other day took 2hrs 30 mind you about 30 minutes the download was sitting there waiting for the panel’s license.
If you watch the download process you will see this is exactly what it does do, but a folder at a time. It downloads all the multi part archive files to disk, then extracts them one by one into the folder, and as each part is extracted it deletes that file, then extracts the next. When all those files are extracted, and deleted it then starts downloading the next folder in archive form.
The only way they could optimise this download wise would be to download a single, massive archive file with everything it needs inside. This would have to differ from install to install as we might all have different files installed, besides different editions.
Good morning / afternoon / evening to all of you: I live in Argentina, I have a team that more than meets the operating requirements and my connection is a stable 16/20 Megas Fiber Optic connection permanently. Since I acquired FS2020 in August of last year, every time there is an update or I have to reinstall the program for any reason for US, those of us who live in South America, IT IS A SUPPLIED. It does not matter if we have 3, 5, 10,20, or 100Mb of speed, it is the same. Apparently the servers that MS assigns for this side of the planet do not fulfill their mission or are extremely slow or far away. I was amused by one of the zendesk suggestions to set a bandwidth limiter set to 5M … friend, if it went down to 5 Mb I would be 4 times happier because I cannot exceed 1.9Mb / s. It ranges between 0.3 and 1.9 and most of the time under that limit. Is there no way to improve? Does having a good connection is useless either? Doesn’t MicroSoft HAVE THE MONEY to put servers in all countries? (Beyond the horrible limitations of the MS Store when it comes to installing the program). I have spent between a week and 15 days to download the simulator, the last time, after 6 days it remained in the bigfiles 007 repeating over and over again, we cannot remain slaves in front of the PC to see if it advances or does not advance, it is a complete shame and I come here to ask you to help me with your vote for the improvement or installation of servers in Argentina. We have paid what everyone paid for the program, but each download, each update is a pain, a tremendous headache for us.
I can not understand how we are treated as second-class citizens, someone in Europe or the US downloads the full game in 6 hours and it seems like a lot, here we can take two weeks downloading 24 hours. Not to mention when we sit down for a while, we turn on the PC and we find that “looking for updates” is going to ruin the entertainment experience because we can no longer use the simulator while it delays, delays, and delays.
Sadly, they won’t listen…
Well I have you one better.
This is utter nonsense 7PM Eastern Time Zone
I checked my internet speed 400Mbps and I am getting 2Mbits/s. If this is not a server problem @ Microsoft I will eat my hat. They did not expand their servers for the Xbox users.
The thing is some of the files are so small before it decompresses them that the download speed doesn’t have time to pick up speed. I’m only on a 100/20 plan and the fasted I have seen in bigger files is 6Mbits/s still slow for me as I can get maybe 10 to 12 MB/s on Steam.