Slow WoW updates

[Mercutio]

One of my students is a WoW player.

She's on a 6Mbit cable connection to the internet and has a very nice PC (x2/3800, 2GB RAM, Gigabyte nForce4, x800 Pro).

She emailed me to ask why her World of Warcraft updates take so long; her boyfriend's notebook (which is a Dell Inspiron of some kind, and somewhat lower spec than her machine) can start and do the updates in 15 or 20 minutes, whereas it takes her three or four hours.

As I understand it, WoW distributes patches via bittorrent. I've already checked the usual torrent suspects: her router has UPnP turned on, and her desktop is configured to allow UPNP to work.

She's not a p2p user at all. There's no other appreciable network traffic. She has a Linksys WRT54G. I've set up hundreds of those, and set them up for torrent fiends. Her setup is normal.

As I understand it, the 15 minutes vs. 3-hour thing has been consistent for as long as she's been playing WoW.

I'm at a loss. Is there some extra weirdness to WoW?

 

[Will Rickards]

shot in the dark: has she tried rebooting her cable modem?

 

[Mercutio]

Yes.
She didn't actually email me until after she talked to Comcast.

 

[Sol]

I'm not sure if the WoW updater actually supports uPnP, actual port forwarding may be needed... Also I'm guessing you've ruled firewalls out.

If she is on the same internal network as her boyfriend then starting the update client at the same time on both machines should allow her computer to get the update from her boyfriends machine. Also WoW, last I checked was terrible at cleaning up after itself so she could just copy the completed update file from her boyfriends PC after it's done.

Back when I played WoW for a bit I always got the updates from Fileplanet, it was always faster than the BT client and it didn't use my upload (So the precious bandwidth could be put to better use).

The problem could be just the timing too, if she is downloading the update right after release and her boyfriend is getting it later then that could explain it since Blizzard seem pretty cheap about providing adequate super seeding bandwidth and seeders don't hang around.

And finally if she is starting her download and then her boyfriend is joining in about 20 minutes before she's finished then that too would explain the situation...

Final thought just occurring, WoW update probably doesn't choke itself so maybe try turning uPnP off and see if freeing up some upload helps. She may have 6Mb down but what is her upstream connection like?

 

[P5-133XL]

One possible reason is that she plays much more frequently than her boyfriend. As a WoW player, I've noticed that if the DL's are early in their distribution then there will be few people seaded with most of the file and thereby you will be competing with everyone else for the same Blizzard http bandwidth (which seems incredibly small because the normal speed from that source is 2Kbps) and no one will get much from bittorrent at all. However, later after many people have the file, then you will get the DL much quicker.

I agree, get the file from Blizzard, through fileplanet: it works for me.