how to increase WoW patch speeds

[Raswan]

Haven't found any data or info on this in the official forums, so of course I'm turning to you eggheads to help me out. I live in Stillwater, OK, and get my service through Suddenlink communications. Speedtest.net shows me getting a 48ms ping, a 9.6mbps download speed, and a 1.06 mbps upload speed.

Yet in the WoW updater I'm only getting ~ 300kbps, which turns this 9.2-gig patch into a 10 and a half goddamn hour ordeal. I realize this will be moot by the time someone likely answers, and I'm certainly not expecting to get the full 10mbps download speed, but I do expect to see better than 1/30th that speed...

Help...

 

[Raswan]

Increased the number of ports allowed to the Downloader (via a youtube tutorial) to include 3724 and 6112, and doubled speeds on both comps to ~ 300 on the one (up from 150) and ~500 on the other. Still pathetically slow, but meh. Any other ideas?

 

[ChippyUK]

Unticking the Peer2Peer option did it for one when I was playing, give it a go.

 

[Jamsan]

That's not as terrible as you think. The speedtest.net results are in megaBITS, whereas your download speed is reports in kiloBYTES. Rememeber, 8 bits in a byte. Multiply your 500KB/s download rate by 8, and that'll give it to you in megabits/s (around 4). While that's still not your full available bandwidth, it's far less of an injustice than the 1/30th number you quoted originally.

Also, if you're downloading the patches simultaneously on both PC's, that's (500 + 300) * 8 bandwidth that you're using (6.4 Mb/s), which is getting close to where you should be.

Unfortunately, no suggestions on how to fix the problem (if it is actually a problem)

 

[Raswan]

That's not as terrible as you think. The speedtest.net results are in megaBITS, whereas your download speed is reports in kiloBYTES. Rememeber, 8 bits in a byte. Multiply your 500KB/s download rate by 8, and that'll give it to you in megabits/s (around 4). While that's still not your full available bandwidth, it's far less of an injustice than the 1/30th number you quoted originally.

Also, if you're downloading the patches simultaneously on both PC's, that's (500 + 300) * 8 bandwidth that you're using (6.4 Mb/s), which is getting close to where you should be.

Unfortunately, no suggestions on how to fix the problem (if it is actually a problem)

Thanks for the reality check Jamsan. Had forgotten the bytes/bits difference.

 

[Phil L]

This may not help, however, I've had issues in the past with the Blizzard Updater being far slower than my connection allows (due to the Blizzard throttling download based on upload I was told). I rectified the problem by extracting the torrent file using an utility (from http://capnbry.net/wow/downloads/WoWTorrentEx-3.zip) on the Updater's executable and use BitTorrent to download instead. Afterwards you then put it in the folder the updater created when it was running, and patch that way.

Alternatively, you can download the patches from various mirrors manually, see http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors

Hope this helps.

 

[Raswan]

This may not help, however, I've had issues in the past with the Blizzard Updater being far slower than my connection allows (due to the Blizzard throttling download based on upload I was told). I rectified the problem by extracting the torrent file using an utility (from http://capnbry.net/wow/downloads/WoWTorrentEx-3.zip) on the Updater's executable and use BitTorrent to download instead. Afterwards you then put it in the folder the updater created when it was running, and patch that way.

Alternatively, you can download the patches from various mirrors manually, see http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors

Hope this helps.

Thanks Phil. I'll keep this bookmarked, for future reference and to help friends. Took 10.5 hours to download it all, 9.2 gigs total. Behemoth. I think I'm just spoiled by Steam, which would've done it in about 3 hours.

 

[imagoon]

If you do not have uPNP turned on on the router itself, there is a couple of ports you can open to also improve performance greatly. The ports it needs open are buried on blizzard's website. (I don't have access to them here.) On patch days I typically open (port forward) those ports in the router and performance will dramatically improve. I also only do one machine and copy the patch files to the others.

 

[Raswan]

If you do not have uPNP turned on on the router itself, there is a couple of ports you can open to also improve performance greatly. The ports it needs open are buried on blizzard's website. (I don't have access to them here.) On patch days I typically open (port forward) those ports in the router and performance will dramatically improve. I also only do one machine and copy the patch files to the others.

I could've done that, now that I think of it. Those files are all kept in the same place? Something like Program Files-->WoW-->Patch-->.temp? And I would just copy them over to the same folder on the other rig, and what, just start the game and the updater would automatically find and run them?

Not on my home machine either, otherwise I'd go root around.

 

[thescreensavers]

When I played wow, I just got the torrent and used my own torrent program to download, went a crapton faster.

 

[drebo]

As stated before, Blizzard's updater is just a bittorrent client. You'll need to forward some ports at your router to get it to operate at the fastest speeds.