Why is my ps4 downloading so slowly

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. It could just be a piece of text saying that downloads will work faster with all other apps closed. So while it's possible to speculate in an informed manner about other things, this particular question will remain as an open mystery.

Big companies don't always get things done very efficiently, eh? So idle that I hadn't even logged in, the app was in the login screen.

The CDN that was being used from to was using a delay-based congestion control algorithm, and reacting to the extra latency by reducing the amount of data sent. The CDN used earlier in the connection was using a packet-loss based congestion control algorithm, and did not slow down despite seeing the latency change in exactly the same pattern.

If you liked this and want to be notified of new posts, follow me on Twitter. Very interesting post! Thank you for doing this research.

Have a feeling this will be posted in forum debates a lot. PS2 can not run any things in the background but I'm just curious about how it's networking stack works, being an older system. Also has video apps like youtube, twitch and Netflix. Large companies don't really have mechanisms in place for feedback like this. Sure, one could send it to customer support or something like that. But the report will never reach engineering.

The best one can hope is that somebody is keeping statistics on exactly the subjects people complain about, and once a quarter somebody looks at those statistics to decide what to prioritize. And also, I think it's basically guaranteed that somebody at Sony is already aware of all the details in this post.

Now if we could only find out why the PS4 "randomly" goes "LAN cable not connected" even though it damn well isn't. Very interesting read. Could you share more detail on how you went about gathering the data used in the graphs? I took a packet capture on the next hop after the PS4. This packet capture was then analyzed with a hacky perl script which just picked out the parts of the TCP header I wanted, and aggregated them by-connection at a 10s granularity.

I doubt the code going to be useful for anyone, but I do like it as an illustration of just how simple this kind of ad hoc analysis can be even without explicit tool support. That's a good guess! Some sort of new failure of exactly that code is what I was hoping to find. But unfortunately it's not the case. All of the connections were using TCP timestamps, but the autoscaling was not in effect at all despite that.

They're clearly manually setting the receive buffer size with setsockopt , and that disables the autoscaling. I didn't check whether non-PSN connections had autoscaling enabled or not. Thanks for this very interesting blog post, BTW.. Have been annoyed by this particular set of issues for a very long time.

Strangely, I never thought that the software could be such an egregiously bad actor in this case. I think a more egregious issue is why the PS4 is so much slower over WiFi than over Ethernet - would it really just be congestion at the AP? But I think that ought to be demonstrably false when I can download at high speeds on a laptop that said, I'm most likely not using any of the same sources as the PS4. I honestly think that the set of devices released by Sony around the same time as the PS4 suffer similar problems - Currently, our TV cannot "find internet" over our WiFi, and that's when it manages to find and connect to our WiFi in the first place!

If they wanted to limit the rate of downloads it would make a lot more sense to set the allowed rate to e. Any thoughts on why Wifi speeds are just so slow?

Is it a similar issue where the software caps speeds of downloads if the system sees it's on a Wifi connection? You're on the right track, except that it needs to go a step further. The allowed rate should not be static, like 1Mbps. It should actually depend on the network conditions. The core goal of making sure background downloads don't interfere with games or streaming is reasonable. It's just that it's implemented in the wrong way, and triggered even when not necessary.

If I understand correctly, I would not be able to notice these issues at all with my 5 Mbps adsl. Welcome to Germany. Seems like a "feature" that only surfaced with the advent of high Speed internet. Interesting to have some figures on this matter although I thought everyone was aware of the fact that apps being open at all limited the download speed. That said I have apps set to be suspended in rest mode but have measured how fast the same download took Both with ps4 on and in game and in rest mode with game suspended and even accounting for changes in Internet bandwidth that occurred in that time period the download when in rest mode was almost twice as fast.

Something not explained by changes in Internet bandwidth. Out of interest I don't think you said we're you using normal Ps4 or ps4 pro? As the pro in theory has faster clocks peed on cpu which might effect how games using cpu effect any download limiting in those cases it also has the newer WiFi chipset I believe. Thanks for that, community. We need people like you in the company, rather than just business folk!

It appears that the ARM coprocessor is not actually used for downloads, even though it was the original plan. Sony stated this officially soon after the PS4 launch, and nothing I've seen suggests that things have changed since then. This was on an non-slim PS4. Yes, there could be a difference between "game running" and "game suspended in rest mode"; specifically it does look like actively playing a game can cause the download to genuinely starve for CPU.

You can find the section where this is discussed by searching for "Horizon". Excellent article thanks. Explains why pointing at my synology nas proxy sorted out the performance for me. I just wonder if receive window affects ps now applications as well.

Sony would shoot themself in the foot if it does since ps4 allow to play ps now game while normal game is idling in the background. Can this be easily verified I wonder? It'll be easy to verify by taking a packet capture. PSN is due to collapse. Its not built for the future. Cant even change your name or region on it. Only a matter of time, and they thought that hack a few years ago was bad. Interesting article! My friends and I do not only have the slow download problem, but something even worse: The "preparing download" takes over minutes times, often even longer than the download itself especially when loading updates for installed games.

Did this issue ever occur to any of you guys? I really wonder if there is a fix for this. Interesting Article. However, there must be other reasons for slow speeds. Otherwise, pausing and resuming a download should not help, which it often does. Sometimes dramatically so.

Impressive analysis, thank you for sharing. I noticed on your graphs you were testing in the late morning, did you see a variability throughout the day? My reason for asking is that in the US, netflix would often be the worst from to , I'm curious if you matched that pattern.

That might indicate an overall network load correlation. The PS4 has a special chip that can download files while the rest of the PS4 sleeps, right?

Probably some integration with that that's causing it.. This was covered in an earlier comment. Downloads being handled by a coprocoessor was the original plan, but that's not what Sony implemented. Even in rest mode, it's done by the main CPU. My belief is that they've done this intentionally to prevent performance issues from downloading quickly, probably with a big issue being disk access from downloading so fast, as well as affecting latency for online games and CPU usage.

While using a local proxy is a good workaround the PS4 at least the original model can be almost unusable while downloading especially multiple downloads , causing both the games and OS to stutter and the controller to become unresponsive, taking 3 or 4 seconds to react to a button press. Sure, it could be that this is what they were going for. The static limit on the receive window means that your setup still ends up unusable due to the downloads being too fast, while other people have their downloads unnecessarily throttled to a speed far below the effective disk speed.

Without it, downloads would take hours, with it, minutes. Is it possible the latest system software 5. Can't say for sure without actually redoing the testing. Download speeds can vary for all kinds of reasons; the only way to be certain are systematic tests. But my feeling is that they haven't fixed it. At least I had an awkwardly slow download last week, after having forgotten to close a game. But it could also have been just a coincidence. It all depends on your Internet connection.

I live in the middle of nowhere and get 1Mbps. I can just about stream SD video as long as nothing else is using the connection, and so I applaud anything Sony are doing to throttle downloads when anything else is using the Internet connection. The problem here is that the Youtube or Netflix app is on is an awful way to detect whether somebody else is using the connection. First, it has false positives due to including the cases where the app is actually active or not. If Youtube is suspended in the background, there's absolutely no way.

Thanks for this nice addition. Probably the PS4 is overheating and you need to clean the inside of your console. My ps4 used to work so beautifully.. And it was so very laggy. Please help. The PS4 internal hard drive needs maintenance.

Apparently it suffers from bad sectors. Please try to full-format it in order to restore its original perfromance. Most probably the PS4 hard drive is corrupted. You have to FULL format it in order to revive it. I just recently got gta v and while playing for about 15 minutes, the game crashed and turned off the ps4 by itself. I tried everything.

I deleted and downloaded it again, but I feel like it just made it worse. My PS4 just became slower and would crash constantly.

Everything used to work perfectly fine until i downloaded gta. Apparently you have to replace the PS4 internal hard drive in order to work around this issue. Most probably you have a failing PS4 hard drive. The main PS4 screen and other games work fine and respond as soon as i press or move a button. You have to connect your PS4 hard drive to a PC and perform a full format on it. Please read this guide for more details. I have rebuilt the data base and reinitialized the whole ps4 and still nothing ive cleaned the ps4 inside entirely and it is still laggy but still runs some games for a bit then crashes.

Is it the harddrive or something far worse? It is suffering from bad sectors that causes it to slow down. Try first to connect it to a PC and full format it , then check again. Hello, Sorry if this is the 2nd time I post similar message.

Could still try to initialize it aswell. Thanks in advance. Thanks for the advice! Great to see people like u still put time into great guide! Your problem is not so critical and is easy to fix with no cost. Please provide us with your update on your issue so that other users who have the same problem may benefit. Recently Ive noticed that whenever I do anything on my ps4 it stutters while watching a show or going through ps4 menu it will stutter back on a input and the background flow with the themes are also stuttering.

It is a old ps4 back from December and this started happening 2 days ago. Most probably your PS4 hard drive is declining. You better do a FULL format on it in order to restore the original performance. My PlayStation system has a please wait message when I turn it on and after an hour of waiting for it to load it goes into a blue screen and stays there until it automatically turns off and the process repeats itself. I have not been able to play for 4 days now and I am not sure how to fix this.

You might have an overheating issue with the PS4. Try to clean the inside of PS4. Or maybe it is a critical PS4 hard drive failure. My roommate downloaded games onto my PS4 and filled up the hard drive almost all the way. After he did this, the PS4 was really laggy so I freed up almost half the space on the hard drive. However, games still lag and freeze after I freed up space. I rebuilt the database twice and it has not helped either. Is this a problem with the hard drive or could it be dust buildup causing the lagging and freezing?

I just got a message on my PS4 saying an error has occurred SU What does this mean? How do I fix it? To read more on this issue and how to fix it, please click here. Games on my PS4 Pro starting to lag really bad. NBA 2k21 loads really slow and freezes almost the entire game. I have rebuilt the database. What should my next steps be?

Try to thoroughly clean the PS4, as you might have an overheating issue not a hard drive problem. Eventually, if you find out that the internal hard drive needs replacement, I strongly advise you to buy an SSD for your PS4 Pro, especially if it is a few years old, as it is much more durable and reliable compared to classical hard drives.

Okay, will look into these methods. Will get back to you and see what works. Thank you. You better get that console after 2 year of its release. It seems your PS4 internal hard drive is failing and have critical issue. The first step we advise our readers and customers to do is to full-format it on a PC. So recently i had a power outage while playing a game.

It had corrupted the system software and i ended having to initialize it and reinstall the system software from safe mode. What else should i try? Apparently, your PS4 hard drive was badly impacted by the power outage. You can read on how bad power outage is to your PS4. What you have to do now is to full-format the PS4 internal hard drive. You need to connect it to a PC and do the full format operation. If after the format the PS4 is still having issues, you need to upgrade the PS4 had to an SSD , as it is more reliable when it comes to power issues.

Hey I recently swapped out the old G hard drive with a new HDD 1TB hard drive and ever since then it has run extremely poorly, I have tried to delete the software and install it back on countless times and all have been unsuccessful. I am sure i have done the install properly and none of the internal hardware is fault. Your hard drive must be formatted on a PC full format.

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PlayStation 5. PS4 Controller. External Hard Drive. Internal Hard Drive. PS4 Hard Drive Failure? Reasons, Symptoms and Solutions. Long loading time. Copying application, game, or media files takes too long.

Slow-paced PS4 copying may indicate that your game console is really slow and suffering from lag. But on the other hand, this is not a definite sign. 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. Test your connection using a laptop or desktop computer by going to Speedtest.

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