I suppose anything is possible. I would ask your friend of they have any download streaming limits in place. or if they are watching anything at the time as someone playing something back I believe will take priority over a download.
Hi BigWheel,
Curious, why would streaming limits cause the downloads to slow? I could understand how they would keep the downloads at specific speed but I donāt see how they would cause the downloads to slow over time (in this case a few hours).
Additionally, I can still stream from the same server at 14+ Mbps (I havenāt found a movie with a higher bitrate to test with). Streaming never slows. This was the same case yesterday: I could only download at 1.3 Mbps but still stream at 14+ Mbps. If there were download limits in place, it should impact BOTH the downloads and streams equally.
If other streams were impacting the download speeds, the downloads would bounce back more often (ever couple hours? or a day if binge watching?). However, I see the download speeds only return after several days, which would seem to support bobiolikās findings of the download speeds returning to full speed after a server reboot (for patches or other reasons).
Let me be clear. The downloads will start at 75+ Mbps and slow in a very smooth curved fashion (as bobiolik showed in his graphs). I can stop and restart the downloads after they have slowed to 1.3 Mbps (for example) and wait even a day or more, and restart the downloads only to find the speeds pickup were they left off at 1.3 Mbps and then they slow from there.
I use this behavior to test to see if the server has been restarted. I attempt to restart the downloads each day (at different times) and see if they are any faster. Today, after retrying for about 2 weeks and seeing 1.3 Mbps downloads, the downloads were back up to 75+ Mbps.
Here is another observation from today:
I am currently downloading from PC #1 at 3.8 Mbps. It is downloading only a single movie.
I then can start up another download on PC #2 and it will download a single movie at 3.8 Mbps as well (so now I am download about 7 Mbps in total from the server). I can then start downloading a second movie on PC #2 and I will see the download speed for Plex jump to about 7 Mbps (so now I am downloading at 11 Mbps in total from the server).
I can start up another download on PC #1 and it too will see the download speed for Plex jump to about 7 Mbps.
So, I started downloading with a single PC with a single movie download at 3.8 Mbps. Two PCs and four movie downloads in total, my total download speed from the same server is now about 14 Mbps.
Now down to 2.2 Mbps per download.
This is the fastest Iāve seen the downloads slow down yet I have download about the same number of files (movies/shows), it is just that the files sizes were much smaller overall.
Looks like Iāll need to wait for the next reboot.
I realized I did not ask but how many items are you downloading at once? Are you like downloading a playlist or just selecting multiple things a the same time or what.
I am downloading them separately due to this download issue.
I do have a playlist created with the movies I wish to download and I select them individually for downloading. I keep a separate list of TV shows to download (as to not fill up the playlist with individual episodes) and then select the entire TV show for download.
I usually queue up a single TV show (multiple episodes) or about 5-10 movies at a time for download to keep at least two movies/episodes downloading at the same time, since it appears to double the download speed (when the downloads are slower than the max speed of 75+ Mbps).
In terms of total downloads: I seem to be able to download about 100 movies/show episodes before the download speeds become too slow to be usable. I got to about 85 today. However, I will see the slow down beginning to occur 5 or 10 downloads in.
I now use multiple PCs to increase my bandwidth usage, since it appears the the download speed limitation is per download, not a bandwidth limit.
Once again, the speeds have become so slow that the downloads fail with the error message I posted about a few weeks earlier.
I have confirmed that restarting the server is the reason for the increase in speeds. I spoke with the owner of the server and have seen the server restarted three times. Each time it has resulted with my download speeds increase to the maximum bandwidth available from the server.
Still unsure if I can share the server logs.
Was he restarting server on his own for some reason or were you asking him to?
First time the owner took down the server for some electrical wiring changes.
The second time the ownerās NAS went down for some reason and he had to restart.
Iām not sure why the owner restarted the third time.
Iām currently downloading at 2 Mbps per download after having 75 Mbps in total available to me after each restart.
The owner mention that he has never had any problems downloading hundreds of gigabytes for āsyncingā locally. This is the behavior I noticed as well with my local server testing too. (I am download remotely from the server in question).
that it is fine when local?
Honestly the only thing I can think of is server owners ISP is throttling the individual connections somehow. I have not seen anything in logs telling to me. I would be good to get them from before they start server up again.
We havenāt seen any download problems when downloading from a local server. Bobiolik and I have only seen the problem when downloading remotely.
I asked the owner about throttling:
He is running QoS via IP address. His Plex traffic is lower priority and that is based on the IP address of the traffic (coming from his Plex server). Since it is IP address only, it doesnāt makes sense why I can stream at 14+ Mbps but can only download at 2 Mbps at the same time. The owner is not throttling otherwise.
As for ISP throttlingā¦can the ISP determine the differences between streaming and downloading from Plex? I doubt is since the traffic is all HTTPS, correct?
Server team thinks they figured out issue. Though fix will likely be in 1.22.1 as it may be too late to get it into 1.22.0
This is great news!!! Thank you BigWheel for letting us know and I personally look forward to seeing the fix in action.
Hi BigWheel,
I see the 1.22.1.4200 beta release is available but I do not see anything in the release notes related to the problem presented in this thread.
Do you have any more information on the fix release?
Thanks,
it ended up being in 1.22.0.4145. I take it you are still having issues?
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Yes, Iām still seeing issues, but I need to verify that the server has been patched to that version. Iām requesting that information now and will post it here when able.
If anything, I donāt believe server restarts are allowing me to download at full speed any longer. I seem to be stuck at slow speeds (1.0 - 1.5 Mbps).
Bobiolik,
Have you been able to test out the latest version of Plex to see if it fixed the problem for you?
I verified the version:
1.22.0.4157
So, the answer is āyesā I am still having problems, and it seems to be worse since I do not see the speeds returning to full speed when the server is restarted.
Okay, something changed and I was able to download again at full speed. I do not know what changed.
However, the same earlier pattern emerge: downloads began to slow down over time. I started at about 60 Mbps per download last night and now I am at about 5 Mbps this morning.
