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May 30th, 2022 06:00
downloads.dell.com worse than dial-up speed
Hello all,
We are using Google's Glazier with OSDCloud to image machines with a customised blank image.
Last week it was working beautifully, both Windows (from Windows Update) and the Dell Driver Pack (from "downloads.dell.com") downloaded in less than 5 minutes total (gigabit connection, no less than 75MB/sec).
This week, everything we've tried from "downloads.dell.com" is worse than dial-up speed, 4KB/sec average on a 1.6GB CAB file.
We've seen this in the past (a good few years ago), but after the good performance last week, thought it was fixed.
After some playing around, we think we've narrowed down the behaviour:
- If you restart the download, everything up to where you left off is super fast, even on another machine, then it crawls again.
- Some files are really fast, others are sluggish.
We've seen that "downloads.dell.com" is served from Akamai Edge:
Between this and the behaviour observed, it's safe to say what we're seeing is cache fill.
Everything served from Akamai is blazingly fast, but anything not in the cache is SUPER slow, implying Akamai is struggling to do a cache fill from the origin server at anything other than dial-up speed.
I should note we are in the UK and I've tried from several different ISPs, both residential and business.
Has anyone else noticed this behaviour? And will anyone from Dell comment?
I've opened a support ticket but they seem to be taking weeks to respond at the moment, even with "ProSupport".
iamacarpet
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May 31st, 2022 09:00
We've been able to fix the problem...
"downloads.dell.com" and "dl.dell.com" both resolved locally to "2.18.102.159".
Speaking to someone online, it resolved for them to "23.212.235.194".
Changing our local DNS resolver to return this IP instead made it go full speed, wuhoo!
DELL-Charles R
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May 30th, 2022 12:00
Hello iamacarpet,
There are times, due to various issues, usually maintenance that the downloads site is slow or unavailable. Maintenance issues typically clear up in a short time. Trying again at a later time usually helps.
I did test download 1.75G and it took one and half minutes.
https://dl.dell.com/FOLDER04967352M/1/SLI_3.0.0_A00.iso
iamacarpet
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May 31st, 2022 02:00
Thanks for the response Charles,
The issue persisted for over 12 hours during all of the UK's usual business hours on a Monday.
As I suggested in my post, your experience may have been due to that particular file already being in the cache at Akamai and not needing a cache fill from the origin.
Regards,
iamacarpet
DELL-Erman O
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May 31st, 2022 03:00
Hi, I don't know what specifically is causing this issue. But as Charles points out, it can often be maintenance-related. But I'm sorry for the inconvenience you encountered during the usual working hours.
iamacarpet
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May 31st, 2022 03:00
Things are slightly better today, with an average of 10.1MB/sec
The site still seems unable to max out our connection though, when other downloads are completing at 95MB/sec or more.
Is this something likely to be addressed in the future?
iamacarpet
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May 31st, 2022 08:00
I'm sorry to say it's a lot worse again, back to dial up speed.
This has been happening for at-least 2 days now, is it likely this will get raised with engineering and considered a fault?
It is incredibly hard to get our machines provisioned when driver packs download so slowly.