Slow Download speed?

from Stardock Forums

I've been getting about 70 meg's in the past 2 hours for downloading Galactic Civilizations 2. Is there any way to speed this up? Normally maxing out my connection's bandwidth I could get 70 meg's in about 20ish minutes.

Thanks

 

*edited to add I have tried switching from USA-1 ot USA-2 with no significant changes.

2,897 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Sincerly, i've dowloaded GC2+2exp from impulse very fast... and i live in Romania, are servers different ?
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Normally Impulse should go as fast as your connection can (I get around 800kB/s). Try using the new download mechanism option in Impulse's preferences (Click the blue orb in the corner). By default it uses Windows' BITS service which seems to have performance issues on some systems and networks (but is better when it does work). I believe we're going to swap them around though, so the more reliable mechanism is the default.


Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
By default it uses Windows' BITS service which seems to have performance issues on some systems and networks (but is better when it does work).
End of quote

I could certainly be mistaken but my understanding of BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) is that it's a mechanism that's intended to operate in the background (hence the name) that intentionally throttles itself so as to not interfere with foreground activity. As a secondary benefit BITS provides a mechanism for interrupted transfers to later be resumed which implies to me some amount of overhead and hence additional slowdown and delay.

If the above is true it seems to me that this is the last type of transfer mechanism that one would want to use if one is sitting there anxiously awaiting a critical download to successfully complete.

Personally I disable the BITS service anyway because if I'm downloading something I generally want it *now* not at some unspecified time in the future and I prefer to have all transfers be in the foreground. This goes hand in hand with my personal belief that *I* should be in control of my PC and *not* the other way around.
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It would be better if we could download patches without these stupid "download managers"

I'm doing a complete reinstall of Gal-civ 2 because according to Failpulse my install had some errors, so I unistalled, cleared my saves and directory and whatnot.

Installed Gal-civ2 originall from disk and opened up impulse and tried to update to 1.5.

It never got past "download starting" after waiting like a half hour.

Opened up SDC and clicked update.

Not even 5 seconds later it was downloading.