Slow & Failing Downloads

[pemark]

Hi,



I'm using external file hosting for about 22 semi-large products (160-560MB each). I've tested a few of the products to go through what has been described as a caching process on the E-Junkie servers.



The first time they downloaded (from my server) they were pretty quick (around 1MB/sec), but after waiting a while for the cache to sync to E-Junkie's s3 (so I've read), I'm now getting about 600KB/sec when a download starts, and then in 7 out of 10 download attempts (after the caching), the files have slowed WAY down - sometimes to 20KB/sec, and then they have totally hung without completing.



During at least 2 of these attempts, I've opened up speedtest.net to rule out my local connection, and I'm consistently getting around 20MB/sec, so it's not on my end. I'm preparing to launch a fairly large music licensing service and if these are typical results, I'm done before I've even started.



Can anyone speak about their experience using large externally-hosted files and if this has been a problem before, or if you're having any problems now (hoping that this is just a temporary glitch, but it has been going on for at least 12 hours now).



I had hoped to launch my site tonight, but now I'm waiting...



Thanks,



-Mark

[pemark]

Another day, and 5 download attempts in a row have failed. No response from E-Junkie thus far, even after calling their service outage line and sending a ticket. Have I just wasted 2 weeks setting up this cart?

[E-junkie_Guru]

Hello, apologies for the delayed response. We typically reply to support inquiries within 24 hours or less, although weekends being shorter-staffed tend do tend to stretch towards the long end of that timeframe. Our service has not suffered a general outage today nor in recent memory, and we have not received any other reports similar to yours, so let's explore your specific case.



I tested the sample link you'd provided via email and got a ~160kBps average download rate, which is reasonable for my 1.5Mbps DSL connection. Note that connection speeds are rated in bps (bits per second) while file-transfer rates such as downloads are rated in Bps (Bytes per second), an 8-fold difference (e.g. 160kBps = 1.25Mbps).



If the cached file was synced to S3 by the time you tested at least 15 min. after your initial completed download test (Firefox would show the download source as https://s3.amazonaws.com/ in this case), then the most likely cause of the problem you experienced would be some sort of network routing issue between S3 and your ISP, possibly at neither end but somewhere along the path across the Internet between them. You could test from another location using a different ISP to confirm this.



This help page discusses some other common reasons for slow download performance in general:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/faq.file-downloads.slow.htm

[pemark]

Hi and thanks for the response.



Yeah, the file I'm testing is def coming from s3. I'm having no other problems on my local connection - have downloaded the file from my server directly (TX to CA) with about 1MB/sec throughput, but the s3-hosted file fails about 95% of the time now, after about 15 tests.



I did just have someone else in a different location (same ISP in same city even) test the file and it seemed to work just fine. This is great news, but now I'm really baffled as to why I'm having problems with it. My ISP states that there's no limit or filtering on my account and I've DL'ed from s3 in the past. I move a lot of data from here (both directions, and rarely a problem). Very strange.



Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and launch the service and cross my fingers that I'm the ONLY one having a problem, it's just very unnerving, as you can imagine. :)



I don't think s3 responds to pings, and they are clever about masking so traceroutes bomb out - no help there.



Thanks for the help and I guess if others aren't having similar problems, then I'm good to go. :)



Cheers!

[E-junkie_Guru]

That does sound like the most likely source of the problem is somewhere along the optimal path across the Internet between S3 and your ISP; maybe there's a major fiber cut or other backbone outage somewhere along that path, and until that gets fixed the only alternate paths available are either really convoluted and/or saturated from all the detoured traffic.