Server not reponding during map download

[herrwasserfall]

I'm playing with a friend and since my internet is very bad, the map takes a minute to download. However, the connection often cancels (server not responding), even though the internet generally work, but is just slow. Furthermore, the server is not responding, but the map still continues to download (see screenshot).

Because of this, just getting into the game can take 15min. The connection during the actual game works fine

Could you please add a way to increase the timeout, or to somehow cache the map, so that the download doesn't start from the beginning every time?

[Rseding91]

Thanks for the report. If your internet can't handle uploading at maximum speed you can limit how much bandwidth the game is allowed to use for map uploads in the server-host settings when starting the server.

[bobucles]

I'm surprised it's 2018 and networks still can't tell the difference between low intensity, high priority data and bulk "when it gets there" low priority data. It's so annoying that my 12kb/s game connections get ruined because the 5GB download NEEDS to complete 0.0023 seconds faster.

[TruePikachu]

Thanks for the report. If your internet can't handle uploading at maximum speed you can limit how much bandwidth the game is allowed to use for map uploads in the server-host settings when starting the server.

As far as I can determine, OP is a client and not the server, and it's the client connection that's bad. This advice, while it still applies to a degree for clientside issues, should only really be considered as a last resort because if there's other clients they'll all also download slowly.

I'm surprised it's 2018 and networks still can't tell the difference between low intensity, high priority data and bulk "when it gets there" low priority data.

Networks do have that functionality, it's generally referred to as QoS, and is present in quite a few modern routers. However, I'm not sure if Factorio actually utilizes QoS, nor am I completely sure it will be applicable to this situation (it would depend on QoS information from the server being allowed to shape the traffic entering the client's network connection, which I'm not 100% sure is reliable to assume can be the case, since it depends on (a) QoS information not getting stripped on any hop, and (b) the bottleneck connection's origin supporting the use of the QoS information; I don't have enough experience to really say if either of these two factors are the case).

[kitcat]

I'm surprised it's 2018 and networks still can't tell the difference between low intensity, high priority data and bulk "when it gets there" low priority data. It's so annoying that my 12kb/s game connections get ruined because the 5GB download NEEDS to complete 0.0023 seconds faster.

A bit off-topic for this bug report, but if you actually want to know what’s up with that, read up on TCP congestion control. Most algorithms, especially the common cubic one, cause exactly that problem. As you can see in that article, there’s loads of different algorithms because researchers want to fix that problem, but it’s not easy. BBR looks interesting, but it’s not without flaws either. I’m using Linux and switched to BBR a while ago and it’s working just fine for me.

It’s actually possible for programmers to mark individual connections as bulk or low-latency (see DSCP) and that could be implemented for Factorio (if it isn’t already), but most home routers happily ignore those marks, AFAIK. (Basically what the user above posted while I was typing this.)