"If I'm playing an online shooter, it makes sense to harshly limit the background download speeds to make sure the game is getting ping times that are both low and predictable," he says. It’s a video game console, so a video game, particularly one with online features, should have priority over the console's resources.
Does putting the machine to rest help? Why are my downloads faster after this firmware update? Snellman attributes the latter to an update closing every open application after the system reboot.Īnd Snellman posits that there are legitimate reasons for limiting the receive window. Whatever the blame, all kinds of anecdotal complaints and observations of the PlayStation 4's inconsistent download behavior have taken hold over the past four years. "To close the running applications, you'll need to long-press the PS button on the controller, and then select 'Close applications' from the menu,'" Snellman says, and that’s a useful reminder. But other applications, like Spotify or a streaming video service, can keep on going. Many users are accustomed to closing a game from the dashboard or being told the system is doing so when they boot up a new one while another is in the background, thinking that takes care of it. Putting the PlayStation 4 into its rest mode "had no effect," he writes.Ĭomplicating matters is that the PlayStation 4 doesn't always make it clear what programs are running. Running an app such as Netflix or Spotify narrowed the receive window to 128KB, which is still "a 5x reduction in potential download speed," and playing an online match in a networked game closed it down to the 7 KB threshold. "And this was not a coincidence, whenever that game was running, the receive window would be that low." That said, some games affect this window much more, others much less, and active play in a game seemed to influence the speed, too. For me, this is one of the most maddening things, to see a download is taking forever, to check what is wrong with my network connection and be told everything is A-OK.Ī receive window of 7 KB "is an incredibly low value it's basically going to cause the downloads to take 100 times longer than they should," Snellman explains. And, notably, running the console's built-in speed test will not reveal the reduced download capacity. something coming from the PlayStation Store. Snellman stresses this the artificial limit "appears to only apply to PSN downloads" - i.e. In one, the game Styx: Shards of Darkness idled in its title screen. So Snellman began a second test that introduced all kinds of different background functions to see what would happen. When the Netflix app closed, the receive window increased significantly. Snellman says he ran two tests, the first with the download running in the foreground but a Netflix application running in the background.
" Receive window," in lay terms, is the volume of data the receiving device tells the sending device it's willing to accept. (This is a great circular firing squad where Sony could blame your cable company which can blame your router and back and then no one ever has to be responsible.) But Snellman says he observed a jaw droppingly small "receive window" when anything was running in the background on the PS4. Juho Snellman, a systems programmer in Zurich, Switzerland, cautions that there may be other reasons for a slow download that are specific to a user's network or internet service provider. The very short explanation is that closing all games and applications seems to work. The true causes of this may not be provable or knowable, but one network specialist has taken a long look at the issue and has some recommendations that may help. Hell, sometimes just a visit to the PlayStation Store can be fraught with delays and spinning progress wheels. Downloads to the PlayStation 4 from the PlayStation Store are objectively terrible.