August holidays, Fileserver to CDN switchover and WYSIWYG editor for descriptions

[EarvinBau994]

Hi, I've just reinstalled Dragon Age: Origins to creat my save files for DA II and DA: I. After finishing my first playthrough, I decided to DL some mods to freshen up the game. I have a NMM installed and so far, it has been a trying experience to acheive decent download speeds. I'm currently subscribed to a 20Mbps broadband plan and all I'm getting is a speed of ~7-20 kb/s. I'm downloading Jojjo's Weapons and Grey Wardens of Ferelden mods for Origins. I am hoping for an update or heads-up as to why we, well some of us modders, are still stuck in the digital dark age?

Edited October 11, 2014 by EarvinBau994

[destroier07]

my download starts at 100kbs and then starts going down till it reached 10 kbs and then the download crashes

[Nighttimeshadow]

i hate to say it but everyone already knows it. this new download system is destroying download speeds. authors please post backup links to otherr sites for people with issues on cdn. cdn is not fully compadible with all isps apparently.

[Nighttimeshadow]

now i get 7 kb per second at most. is this being investigated?

 

[Deleted133263User]

Dark0ne

 

I don't understand how the new CDN works exactly, but I think last night we witnessed a flaw with it :

 

All the UnOfficial Skyrim Patches ( USKP plus UDGP, UHFP, UDBP, UHRP ) were updated

 

 

Quite a few of them had been corrupted by a beta test version of Wrye Bash .. So needed re-uploading

 

Arthmoor did a quick turn around on fixing the problem in an attempt to stop too many people getting messed up with Wrye Bash / Nexus Mod Manager throwing those errors and confusing users as to what to do - And re-uploaded the files

 

 

The files were fine and fixed - confirmed by downloading the same re-uploaded files from AFK Mods site instead of Nexus

 

 

The reason a load of people had to go AFK Mods instead ? .. Even after the upload of fixed files to Nexus ( New time stamp etc at upload time confirming the upload had been delivered to nexus ), people were still getting the same issues as the previous upload.

 

 

We can only conclude that the CDN was still serving people cached old versions of the same problematic files

 

If that is the case - How are people to know when it is safe to re-download a new update to a file, if the timestamp of the upload is no guarantee that you will receive the newly uploaded file ?

Or is this something to do with the virus check system ?

Edited October 12, 2014 by Guest

[DrakeTheDragon]

In response to post #19153709.

I can't speak for every CDN out there, but if it's anywhere like the Akamai CDN we're using in my job, "replacing" files will not exactly work 'reliably' or at all.

There's a couple hundred or thousand CDN hosts all over the globe and they all have to 'update' the file they're hosting without even knowing the source file has changed. So they do it in regular 'intervals' rather than every single time, and the bigger the network the less regular these will be. In our job it came up to the point at which updates 'in time' were not to be expected at all anymore and we needed to circumvent this by introducing versioning into the actual filenames themselves.

If a requested file doesn't exist on the host, it will connect to the source and obtain a copy, which from then on will rely on the host for whenever it's requested again. But if an old version of a file with the same name exists on the host, the host will only rarely query the source again to check if it changed, if it will at all. So our way to 'bust' this unwelcome cache was to change the filenames as well whenever a file's contents changed. Then it's a new file not yet present on the host and as such it's guaranteed the correct file will be obtained from the source by all means.

I'm not sure how the internal naming of the Nexus' archive files works exactly, but if you re-upload a file and the internal filename won't change, then you can almost 100% guaranteed forget about any CDN to ever realize the change in a timely fashion, if at all.

CDN and "re-upload" don't go well together.

But I'd wait for one of the devs or Dark0ne's reply to this before jumping to conclusions based only on my own knowledge of CDN. It wouldn't surprise me though, if it's indeed just like I said.

[Deleted133263User]

So assuming the above is all correct : Further questions for Dark0ne ..

 

The only sure fire method would be a slight name change to files, and delete the old one.

 

Would this ensure NMM will also not have problems with updating files, and notify / download correctly an actual new file rather than a cached old version ?.

[Dark0ne]

I'll get an official response from one of the programmers, or they'll respond here in due course. Cheers for the heads up.

[Arthmoor]

Would you like me to wait on an official response before uploading fresh replacements with changed filenames?

[AxelDominatoR]

Yes, we may definitely have issues with reuploading files using the same filename at the moment as we don't know the internals of the caching mechanism either. I will have to speak with the guys from the CDN tomorrow to solve this and other performance problems that may be caused by the same caching mechanism too.

In the meantime please upload a file using a different filename. I'm really sorry for the issue :(