Server/network extremely slow - likely due to worldstream server location and routing
I love everything about Launchbox, except how everything network related is so extremely slow. Any kind of artwork data downloading is extremely slow, and video downloading is just completely unusable for me.
I’ve been browsing the forums and over the years I’ve seen several people complain of the same thing, and it usually gets dismissed by other users and moderators with a “works fine for me”, and the thread dies….
So I decided to take a quick look of what is going on and I think the issue boils down to “where” the user is and which ISP/network route it takes. I’m guessing you guys at Unbroken are probably lucky and haven’t even noticed it :)
I’m on a 1Gb/s connection in Southern California. Consistently fast for pretty much anything…
I’ve decide to use a single URL as a test case - for example, previewing a Big Box Cinematix video (which btw, just plainly does not work for me….)
I can see the content is coming from 185.132.178.18, which is hosted by WorldStream. From my understanding, WorldStream is a Dutch company, and supposedly they have a global network, but this content is physically being served from the Netherlands. This is confirmed by both a GeoIP lookup and the fact that the latency is around 170ms. Since I’m in California, that looks about right.
This is probably the first small issue - I don’t know if they are able to provide a CDN-like service of content replication across multiple regions, but having a single source in Europe for US customers is not ideal.
Still, on itself, this does not explain the slow download speed. For example, that URL gets me anywhere from 100 KB/s down to 12 KB/s (it varies over time), which is just painful.
I have access through VPNs to servers to other locations of the world. So I decided to do a simple test - routing through a VPN connection to the south of Europe, that exact same URL downloads at over 1.4 MB/s (!). And this is with VPN overhead… that's 10x faster than the best possible speed I get directly.
But to be fair, another VPN connection to the UK also nets me a much slower throughput (~150 KB/s), so it’s not always better.
What this suggests is that WorldStream, or one of their network interconnects has a routing issue, a bandwidth contention issue, a problematic link, something…. which will depend on route, which will depend on the origin ISP of the Launchbox user.
For example, from a traceroute I can see that my ISP is routing through core-backbone.com (which is a German carrier) to reach WorldStream in NL. However, when I go through the VPN in South Europe, then interconnect carrier is Level3 (which is a HUGE Tier 1 network). So maybe core-backbone is the issue? Don’t know, hard to say… the support guys over tat WorldStream should know what’s going on.
Sorry for the long ticket :)
PS: I have a lifetime Premium account, but my understanding is that there is no traffic prioritization differences between free and paid users anyway…. right?
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