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Orbx Server Download Performance


Hobnobs

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This isn't a moan, just an observation. I took advantage of the generous discount and bought EU Norway yesterday but whichever server I try the download is going to take around 9 hours.

Is there an issue or it is the sheer volume of eager Orbx shoppers hammering the servers?

Happy Sunday's!

I should have qualified my post by saying I'm on 70Mbps fibre broadband.

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I tried the U.K. and the German server for FTX Norway this morning: One timeout, retried, one download didn't start, one download was very slow.


 


On the other hand I had three downloads, with a total of 9 GB, running smoothly before.


 


Just my observations.


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Only my very first download immediately after purchase worked. Looking at the timeout errors Cloudflare seems to be the problem. as ist is the nameserver for all mirrors and most of them end up with the same IP


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Yes I have to agree as well that there are problems.  I'm sure it's due to the big sale because I've made many purchases here before and never an issue.  I've been trying since Friday night [ it's Sunday morning here] and I've received timeout error after time error.  I picked up Open LC Europe and Vector and haven't been able to install either.  I want to get more, particularly the latest Alaskan airports, but I'm afraid it will only make the situation worst, so I'll just sit and wait to see what happens.


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Hi all,

Some advice for download: ethernet is better and faster than wifi. But if having to use wifi, force the router to 11g instead of auto to get more stability. Hope that can help

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Basic physics and maths I would think.  Internet is a collection of pipes.  With all the movies and downloads and file sharing going on, congestion pops up, and a bit like a freeway, congestion reaches a critical point and everything slows and it takes  many times as long to clear as it did to start.  Some people will still have open pipes to their routers etc others won't... and until the backlogs clear there's not much anyone can do about it.


 


Not to mention the suspicion I have that some providers etc will choke pipes that look they will be delivering unsustainable loads and break the bank, but that's all it is, a suspicion.  


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Like anything else to do with computers, you're only as fast as your slowest peripheral.  You may have a 100mbps pipe, but if you're connecting to a server with a 3mbps straw, that's what you get.  :D

Hi Bruce 

 

You are right. The  connection from the user to FSS need to connect through local server or servers before finally to FSS server. If any server between this connection is low, then the end user may consider the FSS server is low. In fact this is not their fault. So far I have no problem and has at less 3Mb/sec the lowest to FSS server as my local server are very fast. I hope everybody should understand this and do not blame FSS. Try to find out the speed from your local server provider, may be their machine is too old or too many people use it at the same time that make the speed share by too many people causing a low speed.

 

Cheers

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Orbx downloads have always been very fast for me until today.  One of the downloads today was my normal fast speed but not so for the others.  I plan to be patient and it will work itself out but it's definitely odd.


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I'm aware of the limitations of the Internet and what one slow hop can do to the connection end-to-end. As I said in my original post, it was my observation. I thought it might be helpful to raise it in case it was an issue within the control of Orbx or FSS. If that isn't the case then fine, I learnt the meaning of patience a long time ago. It can wait a few days if necessary.

Mods pleas lock the thread.

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It's not us. They always say it is us, but it isn't always us. I have never had problems downloading Orbx files until now. I bought three products yesterday and the download speeds are very very slow. I am not having issues with anything else, just Orbx downloads. If multiple people who are regular downloaders of Orbx products are having problems, then the problem is at the Orbx end even if others are not seeing issues. If there is something new that we should be doing to make our downloads as fast as they used to be, by all means let us know. But don't imply that there are issues at our end or that we don't know how the internet works lol.


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Hi,
i was just about to inquire when I noticed this thread. I have never had a problem in the past but I have tried all weekend and the download speeds are crazy slow. I'm still not able to complete a full download for ORBX products.

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As I mentioned Bruce, one airport I downloaded this morning was my normal fast speed (even with the thousands of miles from Ohio to Australia) but after that lots of failures on the others.  That's definitely not my normal behavior.  However, I'm glad it's working for most of the other people.  I'm sure whatever is happening will sort itself out and I'll be back in business soon.  It's just very odd it's happening to some of us since that is not my usual experience with Orbx.


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Guys we hear your pain and I have contacted Adrian and Jay for their input. I agree that it should not grind to a halt and you have my word we'll dig deeper ok?

Meantime be assured your purchases are stored safe and sound in your FSS account for downloading when the bandwidth is better for you.

I do apologise to those customers who are being affected and I'll take responsibility for the issue until everyone is happy ok?

Thanks for your patience, it's appreciated.

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No worries John, it's much appreciated! Haha the funny and cool part of this is that now I'm downloading older sceneries that I had forgotten to put back on my computer after it crashed.  So I have PLENTY to keep me busy until it get backs to normal. O0


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I'll come at this from a different direction:  I value the sales, as it allows me to get more scenery for my budget, and I'm aware that bandwidth costs money.  The sales last a month, so I can buy at any time during that month.  If I add to the initial download surge, then I add pressure for more bandwidth money to be spent, which means less ability to knock down prices in future sales.  I'm also aware that anything I purchase now can be re/downloaded in the months and years afterwards, as there is no time limit (unlike some vendors) and no "inventory running out" problem like in physical shops.


 


For these reasons, I'm happy to wait a while 'til the surge subsides before I buy.


 


Perhaps though, there are lessons to be learned for surge management.  You might be aware of the online game vendor, GoG, who have a history of innovative sales.  These are usually theme-based, and tend to stage the products so that only a limited range are available on any one day. Usually, though, all sale items are again available towards the end, when many people have already bought the items they want.  This is a clever way of spreading out the surge, though of course requires a bit of site management itself.


 


There's bound to be a better alternative than having everyone trying to buy/download on day one.  Maybe even delaying downloads for sale items until the surge subsides; if you want something instantly, you pay full price.  That way people would still value the sales and there'd be far less pressure on bandwidth.


 


So now, I'm calmly and leisurely going through my list of "don't have yets" to decide what I'm going to buy later this month. 8)


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Guys we hear your pain and I have contacted Adrian and Jay for their input. I agree that it should not grind to a halt and you have my word we'll dig deeper ok?

Meantime be assured your purchases are stored safe and sound in your FSS account for downloading when the bandwidth is better for you.

I do apologise to those customers who are being affected and I'll take responsibility for the issue until everyone is happy ok?

Thanks for your patience, it's appreciated.

Thanks for your kind works.

I monitored the whole day my (unsuccessful) downloads with various tools and think the rootcause of the problem fis within Cloudflare. Everything goes well till reaching Cloudflare. And this is the only one giving constantly errors ike this:

cloudflare.jpg

 

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ok, see that last screenshot? That link called aws.fss-cdn.com? THAT my friends is an Amazon AWS CDN server & either was resetting itself when the connection was made or was not coping with the amount of requests but read that again please, Amazon server  :) Fortunately the sale is that big that even the Amazon server seems to be creaking in it's box, there is absolutely nothing more we can do other than reiterating the usual, make sure you use www.internetdownloadmanager.com ( free 30 day trial ) so if you have a dropped download you can always resume it. 


 


I am sure you can imagine the amount of people who are buying the software and even here in this thread there are a few chiming in that they have no issues but scanning through the logs, there is less than 0.085% dropped connections for downloads, I usually like it to be less but given the fact that the servers have put out 20+Tb in 48 hours, the fallout is nominal and don't forget you can always send a request to FSS for an alternative link if you REALLY cannot get it, but my experience is that most people will just click on the top link, try one of the others and if that STILL does not work, if all else fails, contact FSS for an alternative link


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I had trouble to download files too. I have tried downloading some files about ten times.


Finally I install Internet Download Manager and download files without problems.


You can try this or another download managers.


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Could this also be the case causing freeware KHQM failed to be opened by exployer after the appeared success of the download? Was adding it to purchased PNW just installed as that airport didn't install correctly ( no paved runway)

Newbie to orbx

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Guys we hear your pain and I have contacted Adrian and Jay for their input. I agree that it should not grind to a halt and you have my word we'll dig deeper ok?

Meantime be assured your purchases are stored safe and sound in your FSS account for downloading when the bandwidth is better for you.

I do apologise to those customers who are being affected and I'll take responsibility for the issue until everyone is happy ok?

Thanks for your patience, it's appreciated.

 

That is all I needed to hear! I can be very patient as long as I know that the problem has been acknowledged and is being worked on. The product is excellent, so it is no surprise that there is a rush to purchase when the price is dropped!

 

Bill

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No, clear your cache and cookies and re download it'll be fine

just tried it again and it only downloaded 81 of the 111 and said it was complete the time before downloaded 56 of 111MB used the FTX site the others are busy

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Ok, so you are not using a download manager, you have to understand the freeware is not on the same system as the FSS downloads, they are not related at all


 


So download www.internetdownloadmanager.com ( 30 day free trial ) and try it again after you reboot your modem, clear your cache again then reboot your computer and download it using the above software. I have been using IDM since it's original release, satisfaction guaranteed.


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Jae Kae, I hate to labour the point but the downloads are failing no matter what

sort of twist you put on it. I use Internet download manager and have never had a

problem before. I will give up now after 2 days of trying 5 different servers.

I understand and appreciate the fact that the servers cannot cope.

Please don't blame the customers for something beyond there control.

Thanks for your tireless efforts Jae Kae

Cheers, Kevin.

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Amazon server  :) Fortunately the sale is that big that even the Amazon server seems to be creaking in it's box...

 

Just wondering why Amazon couldn't simply dynamically add more server capacity during huge sales (assuming Amazon is hosting the downloads)  :)

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Because the AWS does not work like that :) I do not believe I was blaming customer, I do believe I was explaining how and why and again looking at the amount of failed downloads compared to the ones completed within the 95% speed rule I use, you are unfortunately in the minority, that is not blaming, that is stating a fact :) 


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Got it, fortunately, my downloads of my ten sale purchases did all complete within about 60 minutes, with a few in a few minutes. I simply noticed it was much slower than usual overall, that's all. 20TB+, wow, my ten purchases in total was a very, very tiny fraction of that. I'm impressed. :)


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Hello everyone,


 


As the managing director of The FlightSim Store I thought it best that I at least add my 2c to this thread. I can understand how frustrating it is when you've just out laid good, hard earned money for a product only to find that it's going to take longer than expected to receive what you paid for. Believe me I've been in this situation more than a few times. While I won't make excuses for the delays that some of our customers are experiencing during this high volume sale period, I do hope that given some perspective on the situation you may be able to better understand our position and perhaps give us a small amount of slack as we strive to get through what is a very busy time for our server infrastructure.


 


As many of you will be aware, over the years we have continually tried to push the boundaries in terms of our content delivery. It's not always worked out as we'd hoped, but I believe what we have in place now strikes a good balance between affordability where our costs are concerned, and download link reliability in terms of service to our customers. You may not be aware but Orbx products are delivered over a number of services that are shared by only one other publisher. The infrastructure that we have invested in costs the business many thousands of dollars each year to run and provides a level of service, I am told, that is at pretty much the same provided by the likes of larger download distributors such as Steam. We incorporate several different services from various major content delivery technology providers such as CloudFlare and Amazon Web Services, and the infrastructure is made up of:


  • several dedicated servers
  • high speed and high availability DNS and content redirection services
  • cloud storage devices

and various other services that are all rolled up and sent out to our customers in the form of 6 different download alternatives for each Orbx product.


 


This combination of services that form our content delivery network is more than adequate at delivering several times our regular daily demand and we serve terabytes of data during the course of an average week.


 


But... these last few days have not been our average kind of week. In the first 48 hours of the Orbx sale, the infrastructure that we have dedicated to Orbx has delivered approximately 20 terabytes of data. That's about the equivalent of over 4,500 copies of FTX Global BASE. We've seen even one of our most robust services delivered by Amazon struggle during this period, and rightly so, that's a phenomenal amount of data to deliver.


 


We have seen in an analysis of the logs that less than 1% of connections to the servers have been dropped or timed out and the majority of connections are completing their requests. So the services are running reliably, albeit at a heavily loaded and slower pace than usual.


 


We have looked into alternate content delivery infrastructure that would improve the situation as it is now but at this stage the ongoing cost is just not something that a small business such as The FlightSim Store would be able to afford I am afraid.


 


So, for now I simply ask for your patience. The Orbx sale is scheduled to run the entire month of May and you will find that as the days tick over the availability and performance of the download links that we provide for the files will improve. Always use a download manager as has been advised earlier in this thread as this allows you to download from several locations at once and resume the download in the event that you are disconnected. Also note, that at The FlightSim Store you do not have to worry about expiring download links or having to pay to re-download your purchases as they are always there in your account. Alternatively, if you feel it best to have a copy delivered on DVD you can select this option during purchase, or have existing purchases delivered using our Digital Media Service.


 


Thank you so much for your understanding.


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Adrian


 


You should set up a rule for your sale like download on Monday if your name begins by a letter from A to E, on Tuesday by a letter from F to J etc.  :lol: ! Complaining about slow downloads the first day of an OrbX sale is like complaining to be crushed to death by obsese homemakers in curlers  at the opening of stores on Black Friday


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Hi

The usual reason to get in early for a sale is that there may be only a few items available so first come, first served. I see Orbx sale as unlimited products available till end if May at sale price so what's the rush.

Kind regards

Ian

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