Download speed is too slow

VP

A real wonder happened. When I woke up this morning, the Noire had been completed. I am now starting to download Una Corda.

At least I don't need to set up another server, just need to wait for the right time while other users are tired downloading, gates will then be opened.

Thanks for all our replies.

I also have been having download speed problems these few days. Guess I’m not one of the thousands worldwide as well. I’m using both a powerful desktop and a MacBook Pro and this problem seems to persist among them the same. I just got a new S88 MK3 and wanted to some new purchases and it was tough. Downloads have always been tolerable before these few days. So I’m not sure if there’s a sudden surge in traffic at NI. But regardless of how many people using that finite bandwidth or whatever rubbish you mentioned, I think this has to be addressed, especially if you seem to indicate that customers in certain places just have to get it slow. Hard for me to understand that logic since I’m in a country with some of the fastest internet speeds in the world.

As I have mentioned, it’s terribly slow these few days. It has mostly been acceptable until now. Furthermore, if it’s as you said that my location is too far from NI’s servers and the infrastructure is too bad, then pretty much all of the other countries in this region would be in trouble. My location is a base for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud and other backbone providers. There has to be other reasons. Maybe too many people here in this region suddenly buying NI products? Since I have no issue streaming videos and downloading things from all over the world, I would be curious if NI hosted their server in some weird corner of the world.

One strange behaviour is that all files to be downloaded always have a "honeymoon" start where it will download quickly to a certain size and then it's stuck either permanently or for a very long time. And this size varies with the size of the file.

That is something that some ISPs will do. It's called "throttling".

Any ISP can keep a list of internet sites/addresses where big downloads often happen. Like for example, Netflix or Amazon Prime. That's how a lot of people ended up using VPNs, because the ISP can't see the address and so can't throttle your connection based only on that.

But an ISP can STILL see "how much" you're downloading, and depending on time of day or overall bandwidth usage, can still throttle users based on that factor.

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But one other thing, which is actually the reason for my post: If there's even a small chance that it could be at your end, I would recommend rebooting your broadband modem and WIFI router, if those are separate devices. Many times, I would have bad performance until I rebooted those devices (they were separate up until a couple months ago when my ISP laid all new fiber in my neighborhood and put us on gigabit fiber service).

My first clue one day was my work connection, which was through the company's VPN service, was sluggish and slow. You could tell it was the case for anything needing the network, such as loading web pages, using the manager/HR portal for employee administration, and using Skype IM, Zoom chat, or anything similar.

So the IT people sent me a link to a packet-measuring doohickey app that would run on my company's laptop. It reported a few bad packets every minute or two. The tech I talked to said to said to "start gentle and get rougher as we go". So I rebooted the work laptop first. Nothing improved. Then I rebooted the WIFI and broadband devices. Bam! Started working correctly immediately and the software no longer reported any dropped packets.

The above happened a few times over the course of a year, so I just got in the habit of rebooting my network devices at the same time I rebooted Windows on my work computer for updates. That company had a security requirement for all company laptops to be rebooted once each week anyway, and they actually had software installed to enforce that requirement. So I would also reboot my DAW machine and my network devices all at the same time as a "best practice". That kept the bad packets thing from coming back.

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A separate time, my network issues were being caused by ANOTHER COMPUTER on my network. My main DAW was just sitting there, but I had noticed that my home office was starting to heat up, as if F@H GPU folding was running at full-tilt, or as if the DAW computer was idling a GPU-intensive game or something. I couldn't get control enough to shut it down…SOMETHING was hosed up in it really bad, so I pressed the power button and I held it. Once the hard-stop was done, my home network started working correctly again.

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Neither of the two examples above will help you if your ISP is throttling you. But I thought it would be good to know about them anyway, just in case.

I'm in Singapore. Wonder why it's happening to us.

Native Access download speeds are dire over here in central London; I have a fibre connection and they just stall and die. I won't be buying anymore NI libraries if the NI servers have limited bandwidth and problem continues. 🙁