I don't know what it is about the PS4 in particular but if I don't power it on for a few months (or swap HDD) when the PS4 kicks up it's downloads it DESTROYS my internet connection at home. It's terrible to even browse on my PC / tablet etc.

I've downloaded torrents, newsgroup data, used flashget (Jdownloader), ran all kinds of stuff on my network, only the PS4 with it's multiple downloads at once will decimitate my line.

They really need to add a throttling option in the settings, to limit the speed you can download at, like steam (even steam unrestricted doesn't smash my line)

It took me 60 seconds to open this page to make this post, the PS4 is as I type this, downloading FIVE things at the same time. Terrible for disk fragmentation too. It should queue the damn items 1 or 2 at a time at most and or allow the bandwidth throttling it so desperately needs.

I suspect this will never be looked at or considered by Sony :{
EDIT: Attempt 2, to post, due to timing out.......... FFS

You can pause individual downloads, if you think that's part of the problem. Never had an issue like this myself though, and usually people are complaining that the PS4 is already throttling the download speed.

Throttle would be cool for sure. Can't say I have download issues but I tend to do as @teddie mentioned and manually manage my downloads. As long as I can remember I've always preferred to download things one at a time rather than split my bandwidth.

Yea, the ps4 download speeds for me are a couple to a few mb/s max. Doesn't affect my connection. Steam will download at 20mb/s and doesn't change anything either though so i don't know what your deal is. The disk fragmentation thing isn't an issue though.

I have over 15 things queued at the moment though, so I need to pause 4 of 5 items, then another 4 will start, I then pause those 4, another 4 will start - eventually only one file is downloading and all the rest are paused (not queued)

Then I need to manually, unpause each item which is paused, it's ridiculous.
PS4 is very much NOT throttling the download speed, I'm in Australia to boot. It pretty much delivers full speed almost all the time here.

Do you know how the stuff works under the hood? Do they do full file size allocation before writing, so the space is reserved?

I would never use a throttle but with speed and data being limited for people in smaller towns it makes sense

@abrasion: It's ext4. The files are not fragmented like a fat or ntfs partition. So sort of yes the space is preallocated on a per file basis... You shouldn't run into issues until the disk is essentially full at which point you have other issues. Rebuild database should fix any issues you have regarding fragmentation.

I live in the south with mediocre 20 Mbit TWC internet, and its never been an issue for me. There are a lot of things that could be a factor in causing this issue, so its kind of hard for anyone to offer advise.

The easiest recommendation I can give is to only download things in rest mode at night. This way the ps4 can do its thing while you sleep/don't need to use the internet. I did that when the witcher 3 came out, and it made downloading and playing the game (which is 35 gigs) completely painless.

Never notice any issues with that for me on PS4. Steam on the other hand destroys my connection.

This happens to me too. My PS4 maxes out the download speed. I was able to fix it by adding a custom bandwidth limiter setting for the PS4 from my router. I'd recommend checking to see if your router has this function or a QoS function and if not maybe browse for some linux based routers that can support custom firmware like Tomato.

In terms of it "shaking hands" with the mobile store, I would agree.

What about if you're playing a game (so it's capturing video) then kick off an update in the background of another game? Surely the data is then at least fragmented for the video game capture?

@abrasion: It's possible, but rebuilding the database is as close as you get to defrag. You're going to be looking at single digit fragmentation numbers until high hdd usage though so it really does not matter. You won't have any negative effects from it.