In this tutorial I show you how to fix the slow download speed! SWTOR Pre-Downloader. When you start your launcher on patch day and login the launcher will treat it as resuming a download, verify the patch files.
Hello all,
Make sure you skip to TL;DR if you can't be bothered listening to a bit of background story :)
For quite some time I have been having slow patching, I can't even remember how long it took to download SWTOR itself. I have a speed of 10 Mbit/s (megabits per second) and the launcher would only ever go as high as 150 KBs (kilobytes per second) instead of the full speed of about 1 MB/s (megabyte per second). So after going through many and many threads everywhere, I gave up. Almost tried everything. So now that I was so excited about GSF and class changes (Shadow Tank <3), I decided to start downloading the PTS. I got a little depressed in seeing 150 KB/s so I decided to look further into the issue. What really fixed the issue for me was to change DNS to a public one (in my case I used Google's public DNS). Nothing bumped up the speeds as much as changing the DNS, which basically changes the location from where you are downloading (or something along those lines). Speeds went up to 550 KB/s - but fluctuating constantly and even slowing down to slower than the speeds mentioned above. Flushed DNS, no change. Restarted the PC the day after (yes, I am very stupid), speeds are now constantly around 760-770 KB/s, which is not max, but almost 8x faster than it's ever been :D.
TL;DR: Personal story about my unsolvable issue and why I am about to make everyone who has slow download problem's life easier by making a list of steps to take to eliminate all issues
Check the theoretical speeds you're meant to be getting by running a speed test on speedtest.net
Before starting the test, you want to make sure that speedtest.net is using the same units as the SWTOR launcher. Go to the settings (top right of the webpage, next to login) and select kilobytes or megabytes.
Run a test by clicking on begin test, and compare the speeds with the launcher.
More often than not, your download speed for SWTOR will be slower (for me almost 25% slower). Anything over half you should be worried about.
If that's the case, proceed with the next steps.
Use a wired connection if using wireless to check for any improvement.
If no improvement, then the wireless connection is not the issue.
Pause the download for a minute and restart it.
Restart launcher.
Do a launcher repair by running FixLauncher.exe in the SWTOR folder.
It will make your launcher update at soon as you start it.
Open launcher.settings (SWTOR folder) with notepad and make sure that P2PEnabled is set to True.
Restart PC.
Make sure that the SWTOR folder is added to your antivirus' exceptions.
Make sure that swtor.exe and launcher.exe are added to your Firewall's exceptions (both, not just one or the other).
If you want to really make sure that neither your firewall or antivirus are at fault, you can disable them just to check for any improvement in speed.
Flush your DNS cache.
Hold Windows key and R together, type in cmd
In the command prompt, type: ipconfig /flushdns
Try changing your DNS to a public one i.e. Google Primary: 8.8.8.8 Secondary: 8.8.4.4
This can be a quite complicated thing to do, and I will therefore post a well written guide on the subject. How To Geek: The Ultimate Guide to Changing Your DNS Server
After doing so, it is a good idea (I repeat: good idea) to flush your DNS cache again and/or restarting your PC.
This is as much as I know and I have tried, and it's all put here together for you! Other suggestions or anything I've missed are welcome in the comments!
Swtor Update Slow
P.S. This SWTOR help page suggests opening some specific ports and ranges of ports (http://www.swtor.com/support/helpcenter/6602). If you knew enough, you wouldn't want to open ports such as 80 and 8080 because, without further explanation, they are the weakest ports for anyone to break in your network (very common ports). It also mentions a pretty big range of ports that you're leaving open, and you really really don't want to do that. The majority of modem and routers will not block SWTOR, though it can possibly happen on very old models, it should be ok on that front. This may be taken as my opinion
P.P.S. Some other page may suggest fiddling around with the hosts file. It is not recommended to fiddle around with this file, and it is unlikely to affect the download unless on very specific cases (usually English Assets issue, which don't seem to have happened for a while).
Azureus Slow Download
P.P.P.S. I am in Australia, so this issue may be more common here. In actual fact I do know of other friends that suffered considerably slower download than their actual speeds.
Edit: Grammar and formatting.