So we didn't find quite what we were looking for, but there are a couple of very interesting things that are correlated with events on the PS4. The download was in the foreground for the whole duration of the test. But that doesn't mean it was the only thing running on the machine. The Netflix app was still running in the background, completely idle [ 1 ]. When the background app was closed at , the receive window increased dramatically. The time where the receive window stops being the bottleneck is very close to the PS4 entering rest mode.
That looks like another thing worth investigating. Unfortunately, that's not true, and rest mode is a red herring here. Below is a graph of the receive windows for a second download, annotated with the timing of various noteworthy events. The differences in receive windows at different times are striking. And more important, the changes in the receive windows correspond very well to specific things I did on the PS4.
I did a few more test runs, and all of them seemed to support the above findings. The only additional information from that testing is that the rest mode behavior was dependent on the PS4 settings. Originally I had it set up to suspend apps when in rest mode.
If that setting was disabled, the apps would be closed when entering in rest mode, and the downloads would proceed at full speed. A 7kB receive window will be absolutely crippling for any user. A kB window might be ok for users who have CDN servers very close by, or who don't have a particularly fast internet. If any applications are running, the PS4 appears to change the settings for PSN store downloads, artificially restricting their speed.
Closing the other applications will remove the limit. There are a few important details:. So if you're seeing slow downloads, just closing all the running applications might be worth a shot. But it's obviously not guaranteed to help.
There are other causes for slow downloads as well, this will just remove one potential bottleneck. To close the running applications, you'll need to long-press the PS button on the controller, and then select "Close applications" from the menu. The PS4 doesn't make it very obvious exactly what programs are running. For games, the interaction model is that opening a new game closes the previously running one. This is not how other apps work; they remain in the background indefinitely until you explicitly close them.
And it's gets worse than that. If your PS4 is configured to suspend any running apps when put to rest mode, you can seemingly power on the machine into a clean state, and still have a hidden background app that's causing the OS to limit your PSN download speeds. This might explain some of the superstitions about this on the Internet. There are people who swear that putting the machine to rest mode helps with speeds, others who say it does nothing.
Or how after every firmware update people will report increased download speeds. Odds are that nothing actually changed in the firmware; it's just that those people had done their first full reboot in a while, and finally had a system without a background app running. Those were the facts as I see them. Unfortunately this raises some new questions, which can't be answered experimentally.
With no facts, there's no option except to speculate wildly! Yes, it must be intentional. It's not any kind of subtle operating system level behavior; it's most likely the PS4 UI explicitly manipulating the socket receive buffers.
But why? I think the idea here must be to not allow the network traffic of background downloads to take resources away from the foreground use of the PS4. For example if I'm playing an online shooter, it makes sense to harshly limit the background download speeds to make sure the game is getting ping times that are both low and predictable.
So there's at least some point in that 7kB receive window limit in some circumstances. It's harder to see what the point of the kB receive window limit for running any app is.
The only thing I can think of is that they're afraid that multiple simultaneous downloads, e. But even that seems like a stretch.
There's an alternate theory that this is due to some non-network resource constraints e. CPU, memory, disk. I don't think that works. If the CPU or disk were the constraint, just having the appropriate priorities in place would automatically take care of this. If the download process gets starved of CPU or disk bandwidth due to a low priority, the receive buffer would fill up and the receive window would scale down dynamically, exactly when needed.
Especially in a console UI, it's a totally reasonable expectation that the foreground application gets priority. If I've got the download progress bar in the foreground, the system had damn well give that download priority.
Not some application that was started a month ago, and hasn't been used since. Applying these limits in rest mode with suspended apps is beyond insane. Second, these limits get applied per-connection. So if you've got a single download going, it'll get limited to kB of receive window. If you've got five downloads, they'll all get kB, for a total of kB.
That means the efficiency of the "make sure downloads don't clog the network" policy depends purely on how many downloads are active. That's rubbish. This is all controlled on the application level, and the application knows how many downloads are active. If there really were an optimal static receive window X, it should just be split evenly across all the downloads. Third, the core idea of applying a static receive window as a means of fighting bufferbloat is just fundamentally broken.
Using the receive window as the rate limiting mechanism just means that the actual transfer rate will depend on the RTT this is why a local proxy helps. For this kind of thing to work well, you can't have the rate limit depend on the RTT. You also can't just have somebody come up with a number once, and apply that limit to everyone.
The limit needs to depend on the actual network conditions. There are ways to detect how congested the downlink is in the client-side TCP stack. The proper fix would be to implement them, and adjust the receive window of low-priority background downloads if and only if congestion becomes an issue. That would actually be a pretty valuable feature for this kind of appliance. But I can kind of forgive this one; it's not an off the shelf feature, and maybe Sony doesn't employ any TCP kernel hackers.
Fourth, whatever method is being used to decide on whether a game is network-latency sensitive is broken. It's absurd that a demo of a single-player game idling in the initial title screen would cause the download speeds to be totally crippled.
This really should be limited to actual multiplayer titles, and ideally just to periods where someone is actually playing the game online. Just having the game running should not be enough.
I have no idea. Sony must know that the PSN download speeds have been a butt of jokes for years. It's probably the biggest complaint people have with the system. So it's hard to believe that nobody was ever given the task of figuring out why it's slow.
And this is not rocket science; anyone bothering to look into it would find these problems in a day. But it seems equally impossible that they know of the cause, but decided not to apply any of the the trivial fixes to it. Hell, it wouldn't even need to be a proper technical fix.
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Are you sure you didn't "uninstall steam" and then "reinstall it", that will trigger you needing to download all your games again. One Reddit user explains how this can help improve your download speeds:. By getting a computer on your local network to do some of the heavy lifting, it may be possible to increase your download speed. This is especially true for early PlayStation 4 models, which have notoriously flaky network adapters.
Hold the Options key and click on the Network icon in the top-right corner of the screen. Keep in mind that your PS4 will need to use this proxy to access the internet. The DNS servers you use determine which servers are resolved when you enter a web address.
Some have theories that your choice of DNS servers affect which servers your console uses for downloads. The best way to do this is to change your DNS servers on your router, which will affect all devices on your network.
When was the last time you tested your internet speed? If your internet speed is slow to begin with, nothing you do to your PS4 is going to improve things.
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