Downloads Stop and wont resume without closing Vortex first

[hullmat991]

I'm having a rather "frustrating" issue where I'm attempting to download Skyrim SE mods, and the downloads just stop and will not resume unless I close Vortex and then restart it. The downloads run for about 10-15 seconds peaking at 3ish mb/s before plummeting down to zero. The only way they will start again is if I close and then restart Vortex, and resume the download; and then repeat the process all over again. A single 30mb mod took 5 restarts of Vortex before it was fully downloaded!!!

 

I'm a premium account holder, this happens regardless of being connected by wire or wifi, this is Vortex 1.2.11 , my internet speeds are more than adequate, and this happens regardless of my machine - I've tried both my desktop and my laptop.

[Pickysaurus]

Hey there,

 

Sorry to hear about this. Obviously, it's not meant to work this way.

 

Can you try downloading a file manually (instead of through Vortex) to see if you connection stalls for long periods that way too?

[hullmat991]

I just did 6 manual downloads of varying file sizes and they all downloaded without issue. I also double checked that Vortex was given permissions for my antivirus and firewalls.

[HadToRegister]

Try changing this to 10 to see if it helps.

[hullmat991]

I set it to that last night after searching the forums for possible solutions. Unfortunately I didn't see a difference in download behavior.

[Pickysaurus]

I'm unsure what causes this specifically but the downloads are getting "starved" possibly due to some kind of security software interfering with Vortex.

[HomerSparkle]

This happens to me occasionally too, and I'm fairly sure this is either a bug in Vortex's networking code and/or a problem with the CDN, as even with all security features disabled I get hangups in Vortex, but that same file downloads without a glitch using either a browser or tools like wget.

 

Examples of this behaviour include:

• Downloads not starting at all, despite the queue being otherwise empty
• Downloads starting, but then hanging forever at 0%
• Downloads progressing so far, but then getting permanently hung up, despite the Internet still working for other apps
• Download progress not updating for ages, suddenly jumping to 100%, but the file is corrupted (incomplete)

And in each case, immediately switching to downloading the mod by any other means (e.g. wget) works without problem.

 

Bizarrely, this problem is extremely intermittent, which on the one hand suggests it's a server/CDN issue, but on the other hand that doesn't explain how I can immediately switch to downloading that same file with wget and it works.

 

Maybe it's a combination of both. Perhaps Vortex handles temporary network glitches poorly and just can't recover.

 

In any case I haven't seen behaviour like that for over two weeks, during which time I've been downloading gigabytes of mods. But this has nonetheless been happening on and off for years, through every version of Vortex, on multiple PCs and multiple versions of Windows.

 

One thing I haven't tried yet is using a packet analyser to inspect what's actually going on when Vortex glitches. I'll make a note to do that next time it happens.

[hullmat991]

Sorry for taking so long to reply. Norton is my antivirus suite, and while I have double checked that Vortex is to be let through the firewalls; I wouldnt put it past it to be doing something like attempting to scan the files as they download. The weird thing is that I can download other things just fine. Thanks for your time and suggestions everyone.