Multiple Connections slow on some computers

[blootor]

Hi,

 

We use LoaderMax in our Facebook game to handle downloading of all files from an Amazon CloudFront CDN. During the initial load, we download about 15 .zip files and extract them once downloaded.

 

We have maxconnections set to 100 (I'm aware that's unlikely to ever happen), and for the most part, the zip files are downloaded simultaneously and quickly, in about 15 seconds.

 

We are having a fairly large number of users report load times of > 3 minutes. I've started logging this, and it does appear that the zip files take that amount of time to download for some users. We have managed to recreate this on one of our staffs home machines, consistently. It appears that it is only downloading one zip file at a time, then waiting 5-10 seconds before downloading the next one. Pending further investigation, I wanted to ask if there is anything obvious that anyone would know that could be causing this, or if anyone has experienced this issue before? 

 

Cheers,

Graeme.

[GreenSock]

Nope, I'm not aware of anything in LoaderMax that would prevent simultaneous loads (unless, of course, you set maxConnections to 1 but obviously you know about that and set it to 50). I do know that various browsers/platforms impose strict limitations on how many simultaneous connections are allowed, though, so maybe you're running into that. 

 

For example, maybe IE8 allows a maximum of 6 simultaneous http requests and there are already 5 going with images/files on the main web page, and Flash makes a bunch of requests so the browser says "oh, no you don't - I'm gonna allow ONE at at time here..." Unfortunately there's nothing we can do on our end to resolve that

 

Let us know if/when you discover the culprit. 

[blootor]

Thanks for the reply. We don't know for sure, but our hunch is that some users machines were running into problems with scanning of zip files once they had downloaded. We previously thought that it was blocking multiple connections, but it appears that multiple zips were downloading, but as soon as one had finished, there was a pause for 5-6 seconds, before the rest continued to download. This would happen each time one downloaded, adding quite a lot of time to the loading process.

 

I've removed the majority of the assets from the zips that weren't required, so there is now only one small 5 meg zip file to download at the start, and the rest of the assets are set to download after the game starts, as individual image files rather than zips (i.e. it's downloading while you play, and you rarely get to a section of the game that hasn't downloaded yet). This appears to have worked for the most part.