Slow Download Speed Megathread

I was just installing this to my laptop and getting around 20-30mb. Setting the autotuning level back to normal (mine was disabled) is now giving me 200mb+

Excellent, glad to know my original tips are still helping some with this issue. :+1: :grinning:

Iā€™m at wits end trying to figure out a solution. (Steam Version)
Have gone through all the help article fixes and tried all the little tricks.
Have run out of ideas for things to try, and am getting ~2.5mbits/s - Iā€™ll be downloading all weekend :frowning:

~autotuning normal/disabled~
~ipv6 vs ipv4~
~goog/cloudflare dns~
~delivery optimization~
~changing windows country~
~wired vs wireless~
~ran a ram check~
~ran a disk check~
~proton vpn~
~reset router & cable modem~
~updated network card drivers~
~cleared winsock~
~flushed dns cache~
~ndu tuning~
~ran malware bytes~

Also confirmed other apps will download > ~50mbit/s (eg steam downloader)

I dont see how this could be anything but a Microsoft problem at this point. And frankly, no one should need to go to all these lengths to get their software to work.

One of the dumbest things is that while steam is ā€œrunningā€ msfs2020, I cant play other games. Not on the pc and not on the steamdeck. :rage:

I might be done with MSFS2020 if I ever have to go through this process again.

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yepā€¦ thats one of the biggest negative point with the MSFS-internal-installer/downloader. Steam not download that and Steam also not know that the game downloads some things. For Steam the game is simple running. But we mentioned long time ago that the Steam integration of MSFS is not a ā€œmaster pieceā€ :wink:

The only thing you can addtional try is a VPN, jsut in case your ISP is blocking somewhat.

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Agreed we shouldnā€™t have to play around with settings to get it to work but there are a few other things you might like to tryā€¦

The info I posted before usually works, but on a few occasions Iā€™ve had to do one or more of these things to get it to speed up on some people systemsā€¦

  1. Download the latest Network card drivers from the manufactures website. Uninstall the network card from Windows and then reinstall with the latest drivers. Reboot PC.

  2. After changing the Auto tuning level (make sure you are running cmd prompt as admin for that) reboot the PC and then try again.

  3. Use cmd prompt to flush the dnscache ā€¦

  1. Use the AdwCleaner program from the Malwarebytes website (AdwCleaner 2023 - Free Adware Cleaner & Removal Tool | Malwarebytes) and run a scan with it.
    If it finds anything you can choose to quarantine it, but the main reason for this is to use the Run Basic Repair option which appears after the scan and can reset winsock and a few other network related settings.

Iā€™ve also on one occasion fixed someones problem by installing a different brand of Network card and disabling the motherboard one.

Also try rebooting your router as well.

Worth a try before you give up.

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Yes I have an intel net card and it was doing the same thing, some things would download fast and some things downloaded real slow including msfs. I discovered that the windows driver for my net card was bugged and the solution was to goto the intel site and download the oem driver for my card and that fixed it here.

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intel driversā€¦ a good point to mentionā€¦ not long ago there are new drivers from intel with some bug fixes.

I rememberā€¦ ahā€¦ here

note : windows 11 also IntelĀ® Netzwerkadapter-Treiber fĆ¼r Microsoft Windows 11*

Thanks for the attempt to help. Alas, no dice. I updated my post to indicate all the items Iā€™ve tried. Iā€™m hesitant to blame my ISP (comcast/xfinity) since other app downloads (namely Steam) work pretty well with high download rates.

What fixed slow download speeds for me was to reboot my router a couple of times. I also bought a new router and the speeds became even better.

I donā€™t. My download speeds are as fast as steamā€™s.
From day one. Zero issues with downloads on two PCā€™s.
Seattle area. 300MBps

Well Microsoft clearly throttles downloads to a crawl. 50 Mbps on a 1 Gbps connection. Fresh installation has been giong on for 3 hours and is not even 1/4 done.

I downloaded the 40th annā€¦ update with my possible max bandwith of 100mbitā€¦ as allwaysā€¦

SU11 downloaded at 300Mbps for me and I started it at about 17:00 UTC, so it would have certainly been busy on the servers at that time in the UK.

Not had any problems with any of the updates since I changed my system as per my original post, always over 250Mbps.

I dont think itā€™s Microsoft throttling anything, itā€™s some other network related issues that are different for many systems.

A friend of mine has a PC for his own use and his son uses an XBox. They are both on the same connection (wired) and the XBox downloaded at the full 200Mbps his connection offers. The PC however, was only getting about 30Mbps (they werenā€™t downloading at the same time).
After I setup his PC with my suggested fixes, the PC was also downloading at the full 200Mbps.

Not sure why it doesnā€™t seem to work for all though.

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I joined just to say - absolutely nothing fixed my issueā€¦BUTā€¦I just found a fix! Installed Cloudfare WARP! Changing the autotuninglevel, DNS (was already pointed to 1.1.1.1) , delivery optimization, using a VPN - NOTHING woudl improve my download performance. Iā€™m not exactly sure how ā€œWARPā€ works, but it just does! Really hoping this helps someone else :wink:

WARP is the only thing that worked for me as well. Every other ā€œfixā€ did nothing for me.

If warp is the only way that you can connect with the servers, then your problem is that your ISP is stepping on your connection. Because of the bandwidth draw, your provider will limit certain parts of your connection that draw high bandwidth.

I would call and start giving them grief for doing this. You might get them to undo it, you might not. Depends on your ISP, I know I have to call every couple of month and yell and scream, until it magically starts working again (even though my provider denies doing anything).

No, because over VPN itā€™s still slow while every other connection/session is not, and the ISP would have no way to apply QOS to this tunneled traffic. This appears to be somehow DNS related with the CDN, but MSFS Support just blames Microsoft when every other MS connection is just fine (I work in Azure all day long). This is 100% an MSFS coding issue.

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I just wanted to bump this thread and say this is still not fixed. I see a ton of people on the thread doing insane things, when the reality is that the CDN is not working properly. 20Mbits/s max for me still :frowning:

I donā€™t understand why you think youā€™re lucky having Virgin Media? My 5G connection is about 12 times faster than your Virgin connection and the hardware actually works for more than a couple of hours at a time. I will never understand why people go to Virgin these days I donā€™t care about their customers and they give some of the worst hardware that they possibly can which performs at some of the worst it possibly can especially when downloading small files. Not trying to start a war just saying Virgin Media really are not what they have cracked up to be.

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Well your experience with them doesnā€™t match mine.

I currently donā€™t need any faster speeds than I have already have.

Iā€™ve always got the advertised speed and in the past 20 years or so there have been very few outages. And when there have been any itā€™s usually fixed within a few hours.

Compared to what has been available round this way over the past 20 years (mainly poor quality low speed connections over the phone lines 1-10 MBps), the Virgin cable system has been vastly superior.

Iā€™ve not kept up with 4G/5G technology but in my experience although you can get some decent download speeds the latency and packet loss is often not good for gaming. Maybe thatā€™s changed with 5G?

And certainly for the moment I canā€™t get 5G where I live anyway.
Iā€™d imagine itā€™s quite expensive too if you are getting 12 times my 300Mbps speed?

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