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Wii U - eShop server locations

C

CLEEK

Member
Yay, another Wii U thread.

Anyway, the Wii U launched here in Australia yesterday. After reading plenty of horror stories about how long the updates and downloads were taking during the US launch, I had just planned that my first night with the console would be spent downloading. I was right.

The firmware update was relatively nippy, downloading and installing in 50 mins. NSMBU was another matter entirely. It started off telling me it would take 2 hours. A figure that just increased. At 49% complete, it was telling me it would take 99 hours, 59 minutes to complete the download!

As i had nothing to lose at this point, I paused the download and configured the Wii U to go through the proxy server installed on my laptop, so I could investigate exactalty what was going on.

The answer was, the eShop server location was actually Akamai hosting in Japan. And at its worst, I was getting a ridiculous 10-20KB/s download rate.

6p3tu.jpg


If anyone from elsewhe in the world has Privoxy (or equivilent) installed, i'd be interested if you repeat my experiment to see if every Wii U in the world is downloading from Japan. It would certainly explain the appailing download speeds people around the World have reported. Or maybe Australia hasn't deemed big enough to have its own servers.

(In the end, the speeds shot up again, and it was a touch under 4 hours for NSMBU to finally complete).
 
G

Gamer @ Heart

Member
We had a case study of Akamai in one of my classes this semester.

They are a huge cloud service/server company. They have servers everywhere. STEP IT UP.
 
R

Remfin

Member
Latency != bandwidth.

Ping != download speed.

If you're having download speed problems, it has to do with specific links/pipes on the route and not actual geographical physical distance.
 
S

sketchsanchez

Member
i dont know if this is something that'll always work (i havent downloaded something that big since) but when i bought the 20 freaking gig nba 2k, it told me the download time would be 99hrs like the op. I canceled the download, went back to the eshop, and redownloaded it. This time the estimated time was 6 hours, though i think it really took 4.

So, and i know nothing about how the internet actually works (might as well be magic to me)so im just throwing shit out there here, but maybe something gets screwed up with that initial download request?
 
C

CLEEK

Member
x3sphere said:
Akamai is a global CDN, they have servers all over the world. MS and Sony use Akamai as well.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I Googled them last night. The point stands, that I was being directed to their server in Japan. When Ive down the same tests for PSN, I get routed to the US. Which makes sense, as i use a US PSN account.

Nintendo being Nintendo might have gone for the least cost hosting model, and not gone down the worldwide hosting route.
 
C

CLEEK

Member
Remfin said:
If you're having download speed problems, it has to do with specific links/pipes on the route and not actual geographical physical distance.
Click to expand...

Its not the distance, or the latency, but the location. If everyone is downloading from a single server/location, no wonder bandwidth is an issue.
 
T

Tagg9

Member
It's either an error or Nintendo simply hasn't approved the use of servers located closer to Australia. Seeing as they are using Akamai, however, this should all be done for them.
 
P

Persona7

Banned
I remember the wii doing something similar, I captured some data and it was pulling data off some Japanese server.
 
Z

zroid

Banned
Can't believe the NSMBU update of all things would take so long. My system update took about 1 hour to download, while NSMBU's took less than 10 minutes.
 
P

Plasma

Banned
I live in the UK and my Wii U took two hours to download and install the initial patch, if the servers are in Japan and are downloading at 10-20KB/s this would explain a lot.
 
N

NeoRausch

Member
huh.... i downloaded and installed the NL and NSMBU updates in approx. 3-5 mins. maybe it's diffrent in europe.... i dunno. works like a charm for me.
 
W

whatsinaname

Member
Umm, if they are using Akamai, it doesn't matter where the parent servers are located right? (In the case of eShop+downloads).

In a few weeks, when there is sufficient traffic from your part of the world, there will be a server that comes up automatically in your region.
 
J

japtor

Member
whatsinaname said:
Umm, if they are using Akamai, it doesn't matter where the parent servers are located right? (In the case of eShop+downloads).

In a few weeks, when there is sufficient traffic from your part of the world, there will be a server that comes up automatically in your region.
Click to expand...
Yeah Akamai should be pointing traffic to the best server automagically, unless they're screwing up in where they think the request is coming from. This can happen if you use some random DNS server like Google's, but I think that's fixed for most DNS services like that.
 
M

M3d10n

Member
japtor said:
Yeah Akamai should be pointing traffic to the best server automagically, unless they're screwing up in where they think the request is coming from. This can happen if you use some random DNS server like Google's, but I think that's fixed for most DNS services like that.
Click to expand...
When you upload a file to Akamai it doesn't show up in all servers in an instant, it propagates over time and based on demand. Also, Nintendo might have disabled/restricted propagation until it's launched everywhere.

Also, isn't Australia's entire internet traffic-shaped for off-shore servers? I remember Steam and many other CDNs have to host mirrors inside Australian ISPs to avoid problems.
 
R

radioheadrule83

Banned
I did think about getting people to do this myself... I'll have a go tonight and report back which server my console hits up.

My launch day experience (North of England, UK, Virgin Media broadband) was quite pleasant to be honest... the initial firmware download took me about 25 mins, plus install time, which I consider acceptable for 1.8GB, downloading large games like NSMBU and Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing has been fairly painless for me too... I suspect the UK might have its own servers.
 
B

Bjoern the Smexy

Member
radioheadrule83 said:
I did think about getting people to do this myself... I'll have a go tonight and report back which server my console hits up.

My launch day experience (North of England, UK, Virgin Media broadband) was quite pleasant to be honest... the initial firmware download took me about 25 mins, plus install time, which I consider acceptable for 1.8GB, downloading large games like NSMBU and Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing has been fairly painless for me too... I suspect the UK might have its own servers.
Click to expand...

Try downloading bigger games like AC3. I started downloading yesterday at 10pm and for some reason, download speed slowed to a crawl. It's 1pm now on the next day and download is ~33% done. Game is ~17GB.
 
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