Impulse: Why speed matters

Yep, Impulse is smokin' fast!  On my Comcast connection, I average anywhere from 800KB/sec to 1.5MB/sec.   

Can't help but notice that your Impulse shows to be connected to a private server. Do the public servers have the same download speed that can be seen here when under a load?

They do. This is an accurate video.

Well, considering how fast my DL speed are(Reply #1), I'd say yes.  Though you have to take into account your areas network capabilities.

What I primarily notice with Impulse is how glacial patch downloads are in comparison to a full game archive. When I install a game from scratch I get a steady 10 Megabytes per second, allowing me to download a big game in a couple of minutes, which is as it should be.

However, whenever a patch is released, the download speed is about 200 KB/sec, a mere 2% of the full game download speed. While I understand the reason for this behaviour, only the full game archives are mirrored to the fast servers, it does result in the rather odd effect that if a patch is large, it is faster to reinstall the game than to patch it. Now, most patches are not that large, so it generally isn't a problem, but it still one of the less impressive parts of the Impulse download experience.

I still remember waiting six hours to download Doom demo over my 300B/s modem (2400bps) in 1993.

My connection today is about 55000 times faster at around 2MB/s. What took a whole day, would take about one second today.

Technology sure moves fast!

Now if only my connection speed could keep up with Impulse...

Heh, yeah. I think Charter woudl demand rights to all my children and not just the first born if I requested a speed boost.

I'd love to see someonedo a comparison. I know I get th absolute fastest DL speeds from Impulse (generally around 1.2 to 1.5 MB/s). Some of those other 'services' are pathetically slow.

In terms of comparison (I have 6Mbps DSL at home which I measure out at about 4.5Mbps regularly)

Impulse will regularly break 500 KBps.

Direct2Drive will generally just beat 300KBps but is very up and down (anywhere from 150-350KBps over a few minutes time).

Steam will also just beat 300KBps but is consistent.

Speed is one of the factors that I like about Impulse, but the other key point is that Impuse does a nice job installing the product in a reasonable-to-find location (i.e. the way the DVD installer generally does it).  D2D does too, but Steam installs everything in the hard to find steam install location which makes installing mods, etc a big pain.

Same here.... average d/l speeds around 150 - 160kbs on a 1500 connection.  I did have a faster DSL2 connection, but it was $20.00 a month more and downloads were not a lot faster, if at all in some cases... possibly due to ISP server and/or area restrictions, so I cut back to save money on sonething I wasn't actually seeing the benefit of.

I am switching ISP's in Feb 2010... to a 6Mbps connection for 30 bucks less than I'm paying now.  Hopefully then I'll see the blistering speeds others here are seeing.

Were about to go to 50 Mbs... look forward to impulse keepin up !

Impulse does NOW.  But it didn't always.  It behaved VERY throttled until recently.  Kudos to Stardock for opening the server/ISP spigot.  8)

    I use impulse too.   I am in the process of downing loading two games  CoH and each one has 8GB and ave 30KB/sec. I started two days ago and at this rate it will be two more days so a total of 96 hours (4 days) at 1.04167% an hour.

 It must also be where you live too?

Download Speed: 2881 kbps (360.1 KB/sec transfer rate) that is about what i get anytime i run a speed test on my connection and what it should top out at according to what I pay for but anytime I'm downloading through Impulse I notice it showing download speeds usually between 450KB/sec and 500KB/sec.

So yeah Impulse. 

... they still make dialup?  

My first ISP was [eventually] a 56k dialup which was unlimited...as long as you paid the rate....$2 per hour.

That DL would cost $192 ....and thus be totally impractical.

Biggest DL I ever did on that dialup was SP1 of XP ...about 80 meg.

I guess it is Dail up PPPoE on INET WAN(PPP/SLIP) Interface.

Here is the results of http://speedtest.net/ from where I live.

Ping: 136ms

Download Speed: .19 mb/s

Upload Speed: .16 mb/s

Yep, that's one of the things I like in Impulse, it's always maxing out my download speed . Unlike Steam.

Really? Are you sure its not just downloading lots of small files for the patch instead of one huge file for the game install?

Due to transfer startup times, a set of small files can appear MUCH slower then a single big one.

Patches are usually an archive (one file), unless it's game specific. I am usually maxed out with any downloads from impulse, be it full games or just patches.

It's not the difference between 1 file or many. It is the difference between servers. I can also get that same difference I mentioned just by installing another game. Some games seem to be located on a server with a fast connection to where I live, others are very slow.

Can you find another explanation for why I can download one game with 10MB/sec and another with barely 400KB/sec?

In most cases Impulse uses my full connection for downloads with somewhere around 1.4MB/s.

I have to totally agree with Brad on this.

Here in sweden I got a fast 100/100 Mbit connection and its not uncommon that I download from Impulse with close to 10 Mbyte/sec

You know something is fast when its actually faster to download Demigod then it is to extract it!

I have an 100/100 Mbit connection too, and downloading Demigod is indeed faster than extracting it. But do you also have the problem that some games do not download fast at all?