File Transfer Speed

[Sc00t]

I'm hosting custom missions that contain custom assets on a dedicated server. The file sizes range between 7-11 megabytes. Everything seems to work okay, but the file transfers takes several minutes, even with only two clients. The .miz file already exists on my PC, but the file is re-downloaded anyhow. I've compared what's on the server to what's on my client and the two files appear to be identical. When Googling, I mostly found old results that referenced the creation of an autoexec.cfg and including something along the lines of:

net.download_speed = 262144
net.upload_speed = 262144

It looks like this might have been deprecated. I attempted it anyhow, but didn't see any difference. If anything, it appeared to make it worse. Is there anything I can do to speed up the transfer or skip it altogether?

[Maverick87Shaka]

On 10/5/2022 at 9:38 AM, Sc00t said:

I'm hosting custom missions that contain custom assets on a dedicated server. The file sizes range between 7-11 megabytes. Everything seems to work okay, but the file transfers takes several minutes, even with only two clients. The .miz file already exists on my PC, but the file is re-downloaded anyhow. I've compared what's on the server to what's on my client and the two files appear to be identical. When Googling, I mostly found old results that referenced the creation of an autoexec.cfg and including something along the lines of:

net.download_speed = 262144
net.upload_speed = 262144

It looks like this might have been deprecated. I attempted it anyhow, but didn't see any difference. If anything, it appeared to make it worse. Is there anything I can do to speed up the transfer or skip it altogether?

Whenever you host a mission, every client need to re-download the whole .miz file on connect. there is no other way. It's how DCS works.
The settings that you're trying to apply it's still working but you're actually limiting the max transfer speed.

If you don't have good upload speed, just try to limit your mission file, avoiding use .png and prefer compressed jpg for briefing etc, remove audio and other unnecessary file ( i.e. knee-board image that can be placed on client side )

 

[Sc00t]

15 hours ago, Maverick87Shaka said:

Whenever you host a mission, every client need to re-download the whole .miz file on connect. there is no other way. It's how DCS works.
The settings that you're trying to apply it's still working but you're actually limiting the max transfer speed.

If you don't have good upload speed, just try to limit your mission file, avoiding use .png and prefer compressed jpg for briefing etc, remove audio and other unnecessary file ( i.e. knee-board image that can be placed on client side )

 

Thanks for the reply and the explanation. The part that confuses me is that it's a gigabit connection and there are only two clients. Even if it was truly limited to 2 megabits and the file was 7 megabytes it should take just under a minute to transfer to both clients. What is the default transfer cap? And can it be modified?

[Maverick87Shaka]

On 10/8/2022 at 10:46 AM, Sc00t said:

Thanks for the reply and the explanation. The part that confuses me is that it's a gigabit connection and there are only two clients. Even if it was truly limited to 2 megabits and the file was 7 megabytes it should take just under a minute to transfer to both clients. What is the default transfer cap? And can it be modified?

 

If you still have the autoexec.cfg with the following line:

net.download_speed = 262144
net.upload_speed = 262144 

that's why you're limited to 2mbps ( 262144 B/sec ≃ 2Mbps  ), I strongly suggest to remove it.
By default DCS doesn't limit transfer speed and try to use all the bandwidth available to transfer .miz file to the client when joining.

Following you've an example of how fast a client is getting a large .miz file (37Mb) from the server in a quick test that I've prepared on my environment.

It doesn't look like a DCS problem, maybe it's related to your specific network setup ( firewall / traffic sniffer etc ) or hardware ( really slow HD where mission is stored? ) on server.
But first of all, remove that line from autoexec.cfg

Full video of the test:

 

Edited October 10, 2022 by Maverick87Shaka

[Sc00t]

Thank you for the detailed demonstration. I removed autoexec.cfg when creating it didn't resolve the issue. My current firewall allowances are TCP/UDP 10308 & TCP 8088. Does the file transfer occur over a different port?

[c0ff]

This brings up a pretty old idea of client-side mission caching. Will add it as a feature request.

[HC_Official]

On 11/4/2022 at 9:31 AM, c0ff said:

This brings up a pretty old idea of client-side mission caching. Will add it as a feature request.

that is a pretty good idea , maybe size / date timestamp checking or some mission file hash to see if mission on server is exact same one u already have ?