About 200k/sec for a 636Mb update means I'll have to wait almost an hour for the client to download a file that has already been downloaded. This _never_ takes this long. In comparison, everything else on my end is blazing fast, except the Vendetta update utility.

Here's my question: could this have anything to do with file integrity? The last time i was logged in, my game ended due to a system crash, so it wasn't logged out properly. Am i watching the client do a checksum?

update: in due diligence, I waited for the client to complete its "update" (~40min) then ran it again-- it performed as expected, ripping through the process in a matter of a few seconds.

File integrity check, yes?

update 2: now i try to run the utility again, and it's back to a snail's pace. What the what?

I'm walking away from the desk now because this intensely frustrating...i'm not going to wait 90min to log in when i only had about 90min to play in the first place.

Please provide specifics regarding the device you are using and how you are connecting to the internet.

Also a rough timeline for when these occurred might be useful. Please include time zone.

Sorry, it's not the modem or my local network. Other data transfers on _this_ machine are as fast as can be expected, it's the VO update utility that is suddenly an anomaly.

By the way, now that I've let it spend all this time updating, I open the game client and, not only is it using the old default font, but the system now tells me that the font I've been using for all these years (orbitron) is missing?

In fact, it tells me that _all_ of the other fonts are missing.

Sure am glad i waited forever to download a file that i already had so that it can wind up being corrupted by the process.

Now, I try to let the update utility run again to hopefully "fix" the missing fonts, and it's back to this wicked slow rate...honestly, i've been playing this game for nearly 10 yrs. and the update utility has never acted like this.

FYI: i have two DSL modems that serve the needs of this house...this machine is on a hardline to one of those modems...i've tried re-booting that modem and shutting down all other devices on it this morning...I still get everything fast on this PC tower, but the VO utility running like a horse with three broken legs.

If you could start by providing the specifics that Whistler requested, we can try to help. He asked you for details, for a reason..

- What specific type of hardware or device, OS version, etc.

- Timing and time zone (or time in UTC) of the issue(s).

- Where are you (roughly) located, geographically. The update servers are geo-distributed, it's possible that one is experiencing issues.

[Edit]

- Have you tried reinstalling the game? What you're describing would also happen if VO's file checksums failed, because of a hard disk issue. Either bad sectors on a spinning-platter type drive, or an SSD getting worn out and failing to quickly reallocate failed data. This can happen in such a way that it could only impact VO's files, and not be apparent on the rest of your normal usage (yet).

Reinstalling should allocate new disk space, and perhaps behave differently. An investigation with OS disk diagnostics could also help.

You may also want to back up any critically important data off your system, before attempting major filesystem diagnostics.

If a disk is starting to "go", it may progress downhill quickly. Fyi.

To follow up:

Timeline:
-From about 6:30pm Thursday my time (Pacific), until aprox. 24 hrs later..after that, hasn't happened again

My side of things:

-I run VO on a dedicated SSD using ubuntu 16.10 as an OS -- just OS+VO (yes, I could be using a newer release, but there is a odd driver issue in later versions that renders PvP/PvE to be virtually impossible due to trigger lag<-- yes, that would be separate issue that deserves its own thread, but I'm pretty sure it's device specific)

-Diagnostics on the SSD show it to be perfectly fine. (since it is only a few months old, this is what I expected)

-I'm in Eastern Washington.

I'm beginning to think that this was, as you had mentioned, most likely a server or routing issue of some kind since it seems to have resolved itself.

Update:

6:52am Pacific

I open the Update Utility and see the new 1.8.539 and 1.8.539.1 updates, but i'm having to wait for the server to deliver it to me at about 200k/sec or, about 25min to download.

Here's the weird thing though: that's the _second_ time I opened the Update Utility-- the first time, it zipped through the download quickly, but when i launched the game client, the GS splash screen had no logo, just an offset white rectangle...and then the client crashed.

I just installed an NVMe SSD in my PC for the first time today, and i'm getting equally unusual download times right now. Maybe only 10 minutes, but it definently appears to be disk-related. Also, even though the game is running on the new NVMe, my primary hard disk is also pegged at max disk usage, and VO is/should be the only thing running. Next time there is an update i'll keep my eyes glued.

I will note the SAME update just last night took maybe a few seconds when it was on a different hard drive.

Intel i7-3770
GTX 1070 Ti
24GB Ram
Primary Hard Drive: Western Digital 500GB WD50000AZRZ
New NVMe Drive: Samsung 970 EVO Plus on a PCIe Adapter

Edit: 2/5/2021 Has not occured again, so I'll assume whatever the issue was has self-resolved with my own setup

new patch, slow download...30min.

plus, it has, once again, wiped out all of my settings/binds/options (yeah, that happens)

I try to go to Options and change the font and it says it's not there

I try to run the update again and it's still sloooooooooooooooow

getting tired of slow updates and all of my settings being waxed

i'm spending an hour downloading...twice...instead of spending an hour playing

Okay, anyone (new) who wants to contribute to this thread should please include their rough location, to help me determine if this is a GeoIP related problem with a particular regional server.

Also, make sure you reference your OS version as well.

I think there are a number of different things that are getting "correlated" together, and may not be related, and we need more detail to be able to isolate them and actually fix problems.

If your updater is taking a long time to run, please post exactly what the updater says it is doing at the time when it is taking forever. For instance, there's a big difference between "Connecting" and "Verifying files" and "Waiting in queue" and "Downloading updates".

Urshurak, I know you're having issues in the "Downloading" stage, the other issues you describe are very strange, but might be some kind of (unrelated) linux-specific game bug.

Alternatively, are you absolutely sure the disk is okay? An "fsck" can only effectively check the existing data usage of the disk, and if you only have VO on there, that could be hiding a problem. I would suggest making a large file (NOT using the VO disk), using random data, like "cat /dev/random > randomfile" and making something a few GB in size, then doing an "md5sum randomfile" (and record that checksum) and then copying the big file over to the VO disk.

You could use "time" to examine the wallclock time it takes to copy each file, using something like "/usr/bin/time -v randomfile /disk/randomfile.1" and then looking at the "Elapsed (wall clock) time", to see if particular copies take much longer than others. You might continue copying versions of it until the disk is actually filled (copy times towards the disk becoming full should slow down, due to empty-block allocation becoming more challenging for the on-disk flash controller).

Then, once you have the files copied over to the VO disk, md5sum those files in place on the VO disk, and see if their checksums match the one you originally generated on the other disk.

I've seen USB flash drives that exhibited "seems fine" behaviour, and then would go completely haywire when one started allocating more blocks, or larger numbers of them, due to corruption on some small part of the flash, or problems with the internal flash controller that was managing the blocks.

Regular disk checks do not do full-block scans of SSDs, because of the inherent wear that it induces on the disks, along with the fact that it's not "meaningful" because the SSD controller is mapping blocks in the background and leaves any diagnostic software ignorant about what it's actually scanning. So, more manual solutions to filling and checking disks can be useful. There are probably some utilities out there to automate this too, but on Linux I'd personally just do the above.

I think there are some genuine VO problems here as well, make no mistake, and we'll be investigating those. I'm just also trying to isolate other problems that may be causing a "fog" here. The game updater will not pass a user to the game if the checksums of the data files fail. Which means that, if the game is then failing to load assets later (like textures and fonts), then something is seriously awry.