Performance issue

Hi nammto — thanks for taking the time to report this, and sorry no one got back to you sooner.

Let me clear up the thing people usually assume first: we do not throttle downloads. There is no bandwidth cap, no per-account speed limit, and no speed difference between free and paid plans anywhere in the system. If your downloads are slow, something is genuinely wrong — it isn't a policy you're running into.

Here's the most likely cause, and it's on us. Every download is currently served from a single edge region in the western United States. When a file hasn't been fetched recently, it first has to be pulled on demand from our origin storage before it can start reaching you, and that first pull is both slow and prone to stalling. The further you are from the US, the worse it gets. A couple of other users have reported the same thing — speeds hovering around 200 KB/s, sometimes dropping to zero.

To confirm that's what you're hitting, could you tell me:

Which country or region you're downloading from

The speed you actually see, and whether it stalls at 0 or just stays low

Whether it's every file, or mainly large ones

Whether downloading the same file a second time, right after the first attempt, is noticeably faster

Roughly what time of day it happens

That fourth point is the useful test: if the second attempt is much faster, it confirms the origin fetch is the bottleneck rather than the route to you, and that points at a fix I can actually make.

I'm not going to promise a date I can't keep, but this is the most-reported problem on this board and I'd rather fix the cause than keep apologizing for it. I'll post back in this thread once I know more.

Following up — the problem was real, it was ours, and it is now fixed.

You were right, and I was too slow: you posted on 20 August and I did not reply until the 23rd. Sorry about that.

What was wrong: download traffic that week was far heavier than usual — transfers being abandoned partway ran at roughly ten times their normal rate — and that load exposed a bug we had been carrying. When a file had not been downloaded recently we fetched it from our origin storage mid-download; under that load the transfer often never finished, and a download that did not finish left the file on the same slow path for the next person, so it fed on itself.

Two fixes shipped on 24 August. Measuring before and after, downloads that run to completion went from 7.5% to 98%. Those are half-hour windows, so treat the figures as approximate — the direction is not.

To be explicit, since it is what most people assume: we do not throttle downloads, and free and paid plans get the same speed. It was broken, not limited.

You lost a week of service you had paid for, so I have compensated your account directly — the details are in your messages here.

If it is still slow, reply here and I will look at your account specifically.