Unacceptable Download Speed

Discussion Hub General Discussion
33

I have 1Gbit connection.

  • I have IPv6 disabled as per MS recommendations. Made no difference between having it on or off.
  • No VPN.
  • Also using a Nighthawk R7000. QoS disabled.
  • I have port forwarding as recommended.
  • I rarely break 100 Mbits when downloading MSFS content. Most of the time, under 50 Mbits.
  • I’ve also tried bypassing my router and hard-wiring to my modem directly. No difference.

There is no other service on the Internet where I get such poor performance as I do with MSFS. And it wasn’t always like this. The initial download at launch and the few subsequent patches, I was seeing 300-400 Mbit downloads. Starting in late October / early November, speed plummeted to its current lows and has stayed there since.

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34

Where can u get a good VPN?

35

I’ve seen topics about this pop up once in a while and I’ve always wondered about it since I haven’t had any trouble with it.. My download speed is 200Mbps, and MSFS is the same as any other program for me. I do notice that MSFS lists the speed as MB instead of Mb, which makes me curious if they’re actually showing the speed in megabytes instead of the traditional megabits.

36

A decent and well trusted all-rounder suite is Bitdefender.

Your mileage may vary though. I used the total internet suite this year and didn’t like the bloat, so I will be reverting to the Antivirus and VPN only.

I found Bitdefender firewall to cause massive issues with MSFS validation and had to disable it just to play the sim.

37

Wouldn‘t that mean that the installation process would require basically double the storage? Download, process/install, delete the download. That would cause even more issues with people than a bit more download time.

38

Since the alpha, I’ve always downloaded everything at near my max connexion speed.

With 2 different PC @ 2 different places
Nothing to complain from me

39

The thing is with the vast majority of problems I deal with on a daily base (both on the forums and Discord) are about 85% problems on the user’s end :slight_smile:

I won’t deny the installer has problems. It has. And pretty serious ones too. And I know some people know what they’re talking about and actually tried some stuff (and you seem to be one of them :slight_smile: )

Oh, I forgot: did you ever try to limit the FPS for MSFS? One of the bigger flaws of the installer is that it will run at maximum GPU, which will choke the system (and possibly also have an effect on the download speed, because the ethernet card will get burried too)

I have capped my fps to 30 for MSFS via nvidia settings. This results in a GPU use of 3% during updates, instead of 100%. This had also an effect on my link stability. Worth the try, although I know it sounds a bit far fetched.

2 Likes
40

Have you tried not using your ISP and checking the speed? Its what most ppl are saying its probably true that this is a routing issue or throttling with certain ISPS, probably depends on your location too…

Do you by chance have a way to test with say a mobile hotspot, on my ATT phone over wifi I can max out my speed, on my ISP, its all over the place…

Worth a check if you can hotspot to your PC

41

I’ve tried with the mobile hotspot on my phone. A speed test gets me about 300 Mbits. I get more or less the same performance with MSFS from what I can tell. 100Mbits or less. I tested this a couple of weeks ago when I bought the Seminole. It was a painfully long and slow download.

52

I’ve never looked at the ports MSFS is using. I had assumed it would be mostly TCP/443. If the ISP’s are, I wonder what method they are using to identify/throttle the traffic. Clearly avoiding a direct connection is the way to go if you are having problems. I use Virgin Media, and don’t think I’ve ever seen evidence of that.

54

I disabled the ipv6 (I think that’s the one) Should that make a difference?

56

Ok thanks I also have the ipv4 enabled

1 Like
57

Sorry, Pieter. I missed this response because of the busy thread. Not ignoring you :wink:

I’ve not capped anything in the game, but I might give that cap a try. Trouble is I also use VR so I don’t want it to mess with the VR comfort. I know what you mean though. Hearing my RTX2080Ti fan ramp up just because the launcher is running seems a bit overkill. Hopefully that will be optimized in the future.

As you can see, it looks like we might have found the problem. Hopefully it’s broader than just my situation and can help others too.

Thanks for the helpful recommendations! :slight_smile:

58

Hi there,

Do you mind sharing your findings in my thread? Together with some of the forum mods we’re trying to make that thread the centralized place for discussing the ISP throttling.

3 Likes
59

I believe Hester is already in the process of merging this with other threads. I’m not sure if yours is one of them, but PM him and ask. :slight_smile:

60

Ah yep, that’s gonna be mine :smiley:

61

I have downloaded this game twice now since I purchased it and both times it has taken a little over 90 minutes to complete on a 250Mbit line. That’s in the UK using Steam. This game downloads from Microsoft’s Azure platform (and Akamai), one of the most powerful CDNs in the world, and not a server sitting in a back room in Asobo’s office.