Apologies if this is widely known or reported elsewhere on the forum, but out of frustration trying to download Yakuza 0 tonight I went google searching for solutions to the slow PS4 download problem. And hit paydirt: https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/522ttn/ps4_downloads_are_notoriously_slow_i_might_have/

A Reddit user with some network analysis skill attempted to find the cause of the slow downloads, and thinks he's found it. Towards the end of the post, he describes a solution that works for him and links to the tools to try them out yourself. The process is relatively simple and involves running a proxy server on another computer, and routing the PS4's traffic through it instead of directly to your internet provider. This avoids a bug where the PS4 for some reason attempts to request too little data per request and is strictly at the mercy of your PS4 -> PSN latency.

Anecdotally, it totally worked for me. I was looking at 3 hours to download the first 5 or so gigs of Yakuza required to start play, and after routing through the proxy the download took under 2 minutes. The estimated time for the entire payload was somewhere around 16 hours, and is now at 90 minutes. I noticed that estimate bump up (it was initially 60 minutes) over the first 10 or so minutes that I ran the proxy, but it seems stable there. And it's a definite improvement over 16 hours.

This may not work for everyone (and should definitely be turned off except when downloading, no reason to add additional latency when online gaming) but I'm very happy that I stumbled upon that post.

Have you tried just putting your PS4 to Rest Mode? That always works for me. Also, idk if it's accurate but the issue was covered by an emailer on the Beastcast about 2-3 weeks ago and has to do with the type of server PSN runs on.

In the past, I have tried both putting the system into Rest Mode and pausing/resuming downloads, both with some success but most often no improvement. But even when things are at their speediest, I've never gotten anywhere near tonight's speeds (though in Rest Mode it's only possible to know when a download progresses more slowly than expected.)

Edit: Also thanks for pointing me to the Beastcast mail. I'll look for it because now I'm curious :)

As someone that spend 2 evenings downloading & patching arkham knight, i will keep this in the back of my mind. Pausing / unpausing works sometimes, but it's never a guarantee for me. And when you're several gigs deep into a patch / install, it often takes 10 minutes before the PS4 realizes where it should resume the progress bar if you decide to pause.

Downloading nioh took forever, i will try this next time i need to dl something on ps4. Rest mode does help though but my connection isnt nearly as fast as yours in the first place.

I find PS4 download speeds to be quite fast. Having been used to PS3 up until recently the PS4 feels much faster. Sure I put it in rest mode until the next day when I downloaded the Uncharted collection that was around 45GB but for smaller games it seems fairly fast. For example a 1GB patch for a game took a few minutes. On PS3 just 1GB would take half an hour or so.

It's not PC speeds (Steam, Origins etc all are much faster) but it is a big improvement over PS3.

But I still it is slow compared to how fast it could be. My 100mbit connection should be able to download 45GB in one hour if it operates at full speed (12,5MB/s).

I just finished setting up a proxy for my PS4, and the download speeds jumped from around 7Mbit/s to around 150Mbit/s. I'll have to wait and see if this is a permanent improvement, but so far so good.

I understand it's not always an option, but for large downloads, I move my PS4 onto my kitchen counter to hard wire it into the modem. This takes my average download speeds from ~3MB/S to ~15Mb/S. I don't know why the PS4 on the countertop but using wifi is still stuck at the same low speed, like the console limits the data request because its using a wifi connection. I'll give the proxy a try next time I'm feeling too lazy to move all my shit.

@ksck26 said:

If you're in range of many wireless networks, it could be simple interference. The more networks around, the slower everything gets (Ars Technica had a story on the technical details a while back). I've got wired gigabit Ethernet for everything, the speed and reliability are worth the hassle of pulling cables.

@thatdudeguy: Thanks, man I followed you and this other thread about ps4download speed and it worked like charm :).

It seems insane to me that this still hasn't been fixed already in a patch to the os if its just a bug.

The problem is that it appears to be an intentional feature, not a bug. Just a very badly implemented feature. They're trying to prevent PSN downloads from interfering with games, and are basically doing it by artificially limiting the TCP receive window to 128kB (if any game or application is on) or 7kB (if a networked game is on). This is not a great way of trying to make sure one device doesn't hog the network, but it's at least understandable.

The crazy part is that this artificial limit depends on whether the applications/games are on, not whether they're actually in the foreground. Did you watch Netflix at some point, and then switch away from the app rather than explicitly close it? Congratulations, your downloads are now 5x slower. This is especially likely to happen if you've got the PS4 set up to suspend apps when going to rest mode, rather than close them.

For more details, see this blog post.

I have not noticed any problems with downloads on my PS4. Is this a system wide problem?