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Is there a similar diagnostic that can be run on a Playstation 5? I generally have good download speeds on my network but it seems to take forever to install ga

Is there a similar diagnostic that can be run on a Playstation 5? I generally have good download speeds on my network but it seems to take forever to install games on my PS5.

deberon 19d ago
My guess would be that this has more to do with disk speed if your download speeds are decent. Especially if it’s wired to the internet rather than WiFi. It’s always easy to spot the console user in cross-platform lobbies because of the loading times.
- tredre3 19d ago
  The write speed of the PS5 SSD is indeed quite bad but it's still way faster than gigabit ethernet, it can't be the bottleneck. It also can't be the bottleneck with load times, it still reads at 5000MB/s even though it writes at 1/10 that on a good day.
OptionOfT 19d ago
Playstation's networking capabilities are an absolute mess. In anticipation for GTA6 I actually bought a PS5 Pro 2 weeks ago. I had to create a separate IPv4-only network because it would not complete the user-sign-up on the device on my IPv4/IPv6 network. Absolutely insane.
robotmay 19d ago
If it's anything like the PS4, you might be able to fix this by running a HTTP proxy using Squid and configuring that on the PlayStation. There's something really funky about Sony's networking on them, and configuring a squid proxy for my PS4 vastly sped up my downloads. I tried to find an article covering this but I've had no luck, so I'm just going off memory here, but I'm pretty certain that's all that was required.
toast0 19d ago
Take a pcap on your router while you're downloading things and it should be enlightening. If you don't have a router you can capture pcaps with, setup a box with two nics, bridged, between your ps5 and your router and take pcaps on that. I'd expect slow downloads to be either a pMTU problem (but I over index on that), the tcp window is too small, or the download server is far away/high latency. Too small window and far away download server combine to make it worse. Sibling's suggestion of adding a squid proxy likely helps because squid is highly likely to have large tcp windows. Other sibling's suggestion of disable ipv6 is likely to help if Sony didn't bother to do happy eyeballs and their ipv6 infrastructure chooses far away mirrors or is otherwise partially broken. Could also be using a download server with high path loss, that would show up in the pcap as lots of out of order packets.
pfyra 19d ago
I had problems where the download ran at max speed for about 3 seconds and then practically idle for a minute, over and over. Took forever to download games. The solution was to disable the newfangled ipv6 in my router; now I get full speed at the ps5.
- iso1631 18d ago
  ip6 tends to cause far more problems than it solves. But mention that in any networking circles and it's a brave network engineer that agrees. It was badly designed in the first place, CLAT should have been mandated as part of the spec rather than dual stack nonsense.
  - icedchai 18d ago
    Many “IT” people disable ipv6 because they still don’t understand it after 2 decades. It works fine.
    - jcgl 17d ago
      Very much agreed with you that IPv6 is indeed fine. I think it’s even good, even beyond the necessary feature of providing an appropriate number of prefixes. But I do narrowly agree with GP that CLAT should’ve been a goal from the beginning. Dual stack is such a losing proposition for any org that doesn’t substantially benefit from deploying IPv6. Adding in CLATs with a plan to go 464XLAT from almost day one would have massively changed the calculus.
      - _bernd 16d ago
        No. Just no. If ISP would have deployed IPv6 early enough in time, like deutsche Telekom had a properly IPv6 network ready in 2012 or even before. And dual stack is no issue. But as always the ISP does need to not fuck up and you operating system should follow RFCs. All these transitions methods are far to expensive and an unnecessary overhead.
        16d ago

Is there a similar diagnostic that can be run on a Playstation 5? I generally have good download speeds on my network but it seems to take forever to install games on my PS5.

deberon 19d ago

My guess would be that this has more to do with disk speed if your download speeds are decent. Especially if it’s wired to the internet rather than WiFi. It’s always easy to spot the console user in cross-platform lobbies because of the loading times.

tredre3 19d ago
The write speed of the PS5 SSD is indeed quite bad but it's still way faster than gigabit ethernet, it can't be the bottleneck. It also can't be the bottleneck with load times, it still reads at 5000MB/s even though it writes at 1/10 that on a good day.

OptionOfT 19d ago

Playstation's networking capabilities are an absolute mess. In anticipation for GTA6 I actually bought a PS5 Pro 2 weeks ago. I had to create a separate IPv4-only network because it would not complete the user-sign-up on the device on my IPv4/IPv6 network. Absolutely insane.

robotmay 19d ago

If it's anything like the PS4, you might be able to fix this by running a HTTP proxy using Squid and configuring that on the PlayStation. There's something really funky about Sony's networking on them, and configuring a squid proxy for my PS4 vastly sped up my downloads. I tried to find an article covering this but I've had no luck, so I'm just going off memory here, but I'm pretty certain that's all that was required.

toast0 19d ago

Take a pcap on your router while you're downloading things and it should be enlightening. If you don't have a router you can capture pcaps with, setup a box with two nics, bridged, between your ps5 and your router and take pcaps on that. I'd expect slow downloads to be either a pMTU problem (but I over index on that), the tcp window is too small, or the download server is far away/high latency. Too small window and far away download server combine to make it worse. Sibling's suggestion of adding a squid proxy likely helps because squid is highly likely to have large tcp windows. Other sibling's suggestion of disable ipv6 is likely to help if Sony didn't bother to do happy eyeballs and their ipv6 infrastructure chooses far away mirrors or is otherwise partially broken. Could also be using a download server with high path loss, that would show up in the pcap as lots of out of order packets.

pfyra 19d ago

I had problems where the download ran at max speed for about 3 seconds and then practically idle for a minute, over and over. Took forever to download games. The solution was to disable the newfangled ipv6 in my router; now I get full speed at the ps5.

iso1631 18d ago
ip6 tends to cause far more problems than it solves. But mention that in any networking circles and it's a brave network engineer that agrees. It was badly designed in the first place, CLAT should have been mandated as part of the spec rather than dual stack nonsense.
- icedchai 18d ago
  Many “IT” people disable ipv6 because they still don’t understand it after 2 decades. It works fine.
  - jcgl 17d ago
    Very much agreed with you that IPv6 is indeed fine. I think it’s even good, even beyond the necessary feature of providing an appropriate number of prefixes. But I do narrowly agree with GP that CLAT should’ve been a goal from the beginning. Dual stack is such a losing proposition for any org that doesn’t substantially benefit from deploying IPv6. Adding in CLATs with a plan to go 464XLAT from almost day one would have massively changed the calculus.
    - _bernd 16d ago
      No. Just no. If ISP would have deployed IPv6 early enough in time, like deutsche Telekom had a properly IPv6 network ready in 2012 or even before. And dual stack is no issue. But as always the ISP does need to not fuck up and you operating system should follow RFCs. All these transitions methods are far to expensive and an unnecessary overhead.
      - 16d ago