Why so long?

[uncle_petrucho]

Why 3 gigabytes downloading more then an hour? And why files are downloding from South Africa?

Edited August 4, 2021 by uncle_petrucho

[freyk]

Ask that to the owner of that mirror. Use an other filemirror. Or download the whole package other locations, like moddb.

Or help us, by sharing/creating a own filemirror: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Hosting_The_Dark_Mod

For more techrelated questions post them in our tech support subforum.

Edited August 4, 2021 by freyk

[MirceaKitsune]

Likely network connection. TDM updates are pretty fast for me, however FM downloads for anything over some 30 MB take a long time... hence why I prefer downloading large FM's while playing TDM actively, the download process doesn't seem to cause any conflicts with an active game being played simultaneously.

[duzenko]

Our download servers SUCK

I'm on 200Mbit connection. Downloading a 500+MB mission takes forever with average speed of 1.6Mbit. Is it all mirrors or a particular one that I keep getting routed to?

[Dragofer]

From my perspective there's one bad sheep among our FM download mirrors that's abysmally slow even for the smallest mission. Could be the main TDM server that's supposed to see almost no traffic?

[stgatilov]

I believe you can look in tdm_installer logs or game console (at least on the latest dev build) to see which URL is used.

I have just returned from vacation in Turkey, and suffered from abysmally slow internet there.
It took me several days to download 10 MB installer for a program, because download speed was 50 KB/s and the download was frequently stopped (I use Firefox).
Perhaps hotel managers do it intentionally so that people give up on the virtual world, go to the beach and rest better

This forum was very slow to load. Posts were loaded almost one by one.
I had to refresh some pages 5+ times (worse for longer threads) because loading process often stopped before being finished.
Updating gmail and browsing other sites was not much better actually.

On the last days there, I decided to try tdm_installer to see how it behaves in such conditions.
I did not attempt clean install because it would obviously take longer than my vacation, but I did some 50-80 MB updates.
I could not even imagine internet could be so bad!
HTTP requests were dropped frequently (timeout due to effective download speed averaged for the last 10 seconds dropping lower than 1 KB/s).
Once timeout happened during downloading tdm_installer.ini (8714 bytes text file).
I did some improvements to make installer more stable, but it still managed to stop with error: it failed to download 4 KB piece of a file two times in a row!

I have also noticed that mirrors behave differently.
Cabalistic's mirror is Germany was the most reliable for me, and the main TDM server in Canada was the worst one.
Note that the main TDM server is not used for FM or game downloads. However, it is solely used to obtain some "trusted" files: installer exe, .ini file and 2 MB manifest.
It turned out that downloading 2 MB manifest from the main server was the hardest challenge for the installer.
I can speculate that Canada is on the farthest end from Turkey in terms of connectivity. Which is interesting because physical distance from Novosibirsk to Canada is about the same as the physical distance from Turkey to Canada, and for me all our mirrors and the main server work perfectly well and fast.

Note that in-game download is much less reliable than tdm_installer, because it can only download whole FM in single curl request, it does not try to break it into smaller pieces and retry. Resumable downloads are not supported neither by tdm_installer nor by in-game downloader: that would be a mess to implement and maintain.

For me, the conclusion is: we need to support alternative ways of downloading, because no matter what we try, there would be people who cannot use our custom downloaders. For missions it is already available: you can download mission from mirror by direct link on mission database on website.
For the game itself, I guess we need to create and seed torrent for the most recent stable version.

 

[duzenko]

Quote

I believe you can look in tdm_installer logs or game console (at least on the latest dev build) to see which URL is used.

I can't see url's in the game console

[AluminumHaste]

[Mirror Central]
url=http://update.thedarkmod.com/zipsync
weight=0
hidden=1
# zero weight means it is only used if no other mirror suits

[Mirror Taaaki1 (East US)]
url=http://darkmod.taaaki.za.net/release/zipsync
weight=100

[Mirror Taaaki2 (France)]
url=http://darkmod-alt02.taaaki.za.net/release/zipsync
weight=100

[Mirror Cabalistic (Germany)]
url=http://tdm.frydrych.org/mirror/zipsync
weight=200

[Mirror Kowmad (East US)]
url=http://mirror.mstrmnds.me/releases/zipsync
weight=100

[AluminumHaste]

Not sure if these also host missions though.

104-9-33-56.lightspeed.toldoh.sbcglobal.net  Gettting about 22 Mbps downloading from this mission mirror.

srv2020.frydrych.org about 12 Mbps from this mirror.

 

Looks like queuing up multiple missions causes them all to be grabbed one after the other from the same mirror.

[stgatilov]

13 hours ago, AluminumHaste said:

Not sure if these also host missions though.

Yes, the list you posted is only for the main game.
The similar list for missions is in the missions database SVN (you can find it with repo-browser).

Quote

Looks like queuing up multiple missions causes them all to be grabbed one after the other from the same mirror.

It should not work this way.
I think list of mirrors should be shuffled randomly, independently for each mission.

[AluminumHaste]

It will if I pick one mission, download it, then pick another etc. When I selected 3 missions to download,  they all came from the same mirror.  Could be coincidence