Downloading 2023

[Jim McGinnis]

I just recently purchased and downloaded the online version of BIB 2023.
It took hours to complete the download.
Is it my computer/internet or has others had this problem?

[Dave Mudgett]

I just downloaded the base Pro version last night. 98% of it downloaded within 20 minutes, and then it took 3 hours to finish the last 2% at near-dialup rates (circa 50-100 kbps). I should have done an ookla speedtest to see if my ISP was throttling me or running low on bandwidth (it's a 32 GB download and it was NYE) or if the issue was at the BIAB end - but there was New Years Eve stuff going on, so I didn't birddog it.

It did finally download, and they told me that the download link is good for 5 years.

[Bob Shilling]

New to BIAB. I just purchased the 2023 Pro version three days ago (12/29). It took about 45 mins to download and install. I also ordered the $15, USB backup. That came by USPS yesterday. It's simple to get started, but looks like a steep learning curve to really get into it.

[Dave Mudgett]

FYI - I went in and tried to re-download one of the two files that were taking so long, which were realtracks_pro_12.exe and realtracks_pro_13.exe - I tested on realtracks_pro_13.exe. The average download speed is 60-70 KB/s = 0.6-0.7 MB/s, while the speedtest for my ISP is showing 740Mb/s or about 92MB/s for downloads. Estimated completion time for just that roughly 1.2GB file is over 3 hours. So my bottleneck is between my ISP and pgmusic. I called it quits after a few minutes, the goal was to simply see if it was still slow.

It may be a general bandwidth issue, or perhaps there is something with those two particular files. As I stated earlier, I got most of the download (about 29 GB) in about 20 minutes to start. That implies a rate of about 30,000MB/(20min*60s/minute) = 30,000MB/1200s or about 25MB/s, which is a bit more than a quarter of the potential bandwidth of my connection. And it took over 3 hours to finish the remaining GB or two. So there is a major bottleneck somewhere beyond my ISP.

[Jim Fogle]

Dave,

You may find the utility app, WinMTR, useful.

WinMTR is a free MS Windows visual application that combines the functionality of the traceroute and ping in a single network diagnostic tool.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/winmtr/

PG Music posted the following request awhile back:

If anyone experiences a slower than usual download it would be great if you could post:

A) The time including timezone, and your IP address (type into google "what is my public IPv4 address")

B) MTR or traceroute report. On Windows, you can download and unzip this portable .exe and have it handy.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/winmtr/

Then if you want to run a test, run the exe and type in the host name - the first part of the download URL (e.g. dl11.pgmusic.com). Let it run for a minute, then copy and paste the text.

Below is an example of a trace between my home network and PG Music.

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| homeportal - 0 | 10 | 10 | 4 | 6 | 10 | 8 |
|99-125-170-1.lightspeed.gnbonc.sbcglobal.net - 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 | 32 | 58 | 34 |
| 99.94.204.52 - 0 | 10 | 10 | 21 | 32 | 54 | 31 |
| 12.123.138.222 - 0 | 10 | 10 | 35 | 45 | 61 | 35 |
| rlgnc22crs.ip.att.net - 0 | 10 | 10 | 34 | 46 | 62 | 45 |
| wswdc21crs.ip.att.net - 0 | 10 | 10 | 36 | 46 | 64 | 39 |
| wswdc401igs.ip.att.net - 0 | 10 | 10 | 32 | 43 | 67 | 37 |
| 192.205.37.194 - 0 | 10 | 10 | 41 | 49 | 68 | 63 |
| ae3.cr9-mtl1.ip4.gtt.net - 0 | 10 | 10 | 48 | 56 | 79 | 59 |
| 76.74.1.143 - 0 | 10 | 10 | 54 | 59 | 71 | 57 |
| ae-1.br01.mtl-03.ca.leaseweb.net - 0 | 10 | 10 | 48 | 55 | 74 | 51 |
| po-1.ce24.mtl-03.ca.leaseweb.net - 10 | 10 | 9 | 54 | 61 | 90 | 54 |
| pgmusic.com - 17 | 6 | 5 | 44 | 53 | 67 | 50 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider

[Dave Mudgett]

Jim, one doesn't need a windows gui program to do a traceroute or ping. I did that via the command line, there was nothing funny going on. Traceroute from here to pgmusic.com = 70.38.54.188 shows about 14 hops, and pinging gives a packet round-trip time of about 40 ms. Did then and still does.

So there's absolutely no connection problem, per se. The throughput on a large file was just very slow, and not between me and my own ISP. I did try some downloads elsewhere, and they were speedy as could be, even as the pgmusic download was slagging at sub-100KB/s speeds. I got my download, and that's all that really matters. They were doing a hard push with end-of-year specials, so it may have just been heavy traffic on their server. And as I stated earlier - most of the files downloaded at a very fast rate before it started to slag.

FWIW, the traceroute to the forum was/is much more dicey, and pinging gave (and still gives) a packet round-trip time of around 82 ms. Pretty typical for coast-to-coast, where even speed-of-light propagation delay of at least 4000 km at roughly 1ms/100km gives a roughly 40 ms latency floor. I gather the closest pgmusic server is in Montreal, which explains the lower, roughly 40 ms, round-trip packet latency to pgmusic.