Does DIM Now Download Files via Quantum Teleportation?

Escribano

I bought some stuff in the Black Friday deals yesterday, but forgot to download them. I remembered it about half an hour before I started typing this post. 

So I booted up Daz Install Manager, queued up the nine items and started to download. Almost immediately, my internet connection went down, as it periodically does. I could tell it was down because my Roku froze; I checked an app on my phone to verify it was down. It usually comes back in a couple of minutes, so I was annoyed but not overly concerned.

It seemed to be taking longer than usual. So I went to the other room to look at the wifi router. It was flashing red as I expected. I considered rebooting the modem... but decided to give it more time.

I returned to my PC and discovered, to my surprise, that DIM was still downloading the items I had bought. In fact, it had already installed more than half of them. I could see the download progress bars slowly filling up as I watched. Yet when I opened up a browser window on the same PC, Chrome said I had no internet connection. My phone could not connect to the internet. My tablet could not connect, either.

DIM finished downloading all but two of the files before the internet finally came back up ten minutes later - it had been down for about 20 minutes total (much longer than usual).

Can anyone offer an explanation for how DIM was able to download all of those product files despite the fact that I had no internet connection on the same PC, or any other device in my house?

 

SofaCitizen

It sounds like your internet was not actually down but DIM was eating up all your bandwidth. I don't believe you can cap the actual bandwidth DIM can have access to but if you go into the Settings within DIM under the Downloads tab there is a value for "Max Connections" - try dropping that value down a bit to see if future downloads will leave you some bandwidth for other activities.

If not, you may have to check your router config to see if there is any load-balancing or QoS options. Alternatively you may have to limit downloads to times where you do not need the internet for anything else.

NylonGirl

I think some of these routers have "QOS" settings that let you decide which device or services get priority when your internet connection can only do so many things at once. There may be a setting that lets you give the Roku prority over the laptop. Or streaming video priority over all else. And everything else would still work, just not when you're watching videos.

Richard Haseltine

I have never had DIM crowd out other uses of my bandwidth, if you have regular drop-outs i wonder if theya re protocol-specific rather than complete drops, so some things continue to work (though I would think DIM probably uses plasin Internet Protocol).

McGyver

Quantum Teleportation is a reasonable possibility... but also it could be something else...
I recently(ish) replaced an older router that seemed to split up the bandwidth poorly... I forgot what it's called, but it seems like some routers say they handle "X" bandwidth, but they'll have two or three "channels"(forget the correct term)that the total bandwidth is split between... like one will be for a hardwired connection and maybe one or two others for WiFi... so like you can assign one for guest WiFi or something... like in our house my computer is plugged directly into the Ethernet port, which is a pretty small bandwidth compared to the WiFi channels, and the two WiFi channels are left for devices... when someone is hogging up one of those channels watching Netflix and playing video games, usually I'll have to tell whatever device I'm on to go to the other channel... that old router I replaced split the bandwidth poorly, giving preference to the hardwired connection (in its defense it was an old router being used as an auxiliary "range" extending router)... If your router is older or isn't one of those freaky trilobite looking things with the fifty paddle shaped antennas sticking out of it, that could be a possibility... 

Or...

You are correct Escribano... you've noticed a glitch in the matrix... the Digital Art Zone as it's called...

So as not to derail this thread and attract the attention of the Digital Art Zone overlords, if you are ready for the real answer... see this thread...

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/67666/please-ignore-this-thread/p36   

Find my post... the really long one... not the one about Smart-Cheese...

Or don't... it's up to you...

WendyLuvsCatz

my WiFi dongle when it drops out the downloads seem to have a cache of data still before it ceases, up to a minute of Youtube video stream and most single DIM downloads 

if a queue and 4 downloads at once at least 2 will come up retry

Escribano

SofaCitizen said:

It sounds like your internet was not actually down but DIM was eating up all your bandwidth. I don't believe you can cap the actual bandwidth DIM can have access to but if you go into the Settings within DIM under the Downloads tab there is a value for "Max Connections" - try dropping that value down a bit to see if future downloads will leave you some bandwidth for other activities.

If not, you may have to check your router config to see if there is any load-balancing or QoS options. Alternatively you may have to limit downloads to times where you do not need the internet for anything else.

Well, I was the only one awake when I started the download, and the Roku should have been the only other device using any bandwidth at the time (a couple of phones and a tablet were connected, but not actively using bandwidth). That said, I have often used DIM to download during the middle of the day when there are two TVs with Roku running, and did not notice any service interruptions associated with it. 

Perhaps it was the size of these files that made a difference. I don't recall how big they were, but with DIM running multiple downloads simultaneously, I can see that being a problem. I went ahead and lowered the number of max connections in DIM to 1 per your suggestion. I'll see if that helps in the future :)

Escribano

Richard Haseltine said:

I have never had DIM crowd out other uses of my bandwidth, if you have regular drop-outs i wonder if theya re protocol-specific rather than complete drops, so some things continue to work (though I would think DIM probably uses plasin Internet Protocol).

I think this is the first time I had DIM downloading something during a drop-out, so I never had an opportunity to observe this phenomenon before. It struck me as peculiar, which is why I brought it up here. I'm glad that I did, because all of the responses have been informative.

We have had technicians from the cable company out several times to look into our internet issues, and they have yet to sort out the problem. This incident gives me yet another data point to bring up the next time they come out. Perhaps it will help the technician finally figure out how to fix it :)

Dartanbeck

Your first instict was close. The truth is: DIM is Magic!!! :)

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e

I HAVE had instances where my internet went down, such that I couldn't then web-browse, and stuff like Discord went to the whirling-gamecontoller-face, and stuff.... but one particular, text-based chatroom (actually, a MUCK repurposed inta a chatroom) was still working.  So, yeah, some stuff that you've already connected to keeps working, presumably because one of the main things that went whoopsy was the ISP's DNS server and related, but that MUCK was still working because my machine already knew the IP address to it from before the whoopsy.

Technology is wierd!