Painfully-slow download speeds

greybeard

I have the same issue but it is also with FF, Edge, PaleMoon and SeaMonkey.
Have checked that it is not my AV (Sophos Home Free) by doing 2 downloads, one with it disabled and then re-enabling for the other.
Certain times of day are much worse than others so I am putting it down to my ISP (which has a large commercial accounts) as well as home users and my speeds increase dramatically when businesses close for the day (or so it seems).

Using: Vivaldi Snapshot,
Vivaldi 4.2.2406.4 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Revision 1393e28a4be47276822f775d4ee694921224a6f1
OS Windows 10 OS Version 2009 (Build 19043.1165)
Win10 Home 21H1
HP Pavilion laptop, i5-6200, 16GB RAM, Intel(R) HD Graphics 520

There are times when I think I'm still using my old modem .

Pathduck

@snlj said in Painfully-slow download speeds:

If there is something I'm overlooking, then good, but also why is only Vivaldi targeted and not Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Brave?

There's probably something really basic you're overlooking on your system, something you've installed or setup and forgotten about - Firewall, proxy, VPN, anti-malware/virus etc.

Obviously this is nothing specific to Vivaldi in general, this is something on your system, and it's up to you to do the necessary troubleshooting to figure it out. I will try to get the thought process started with the following questions:

Any specific files this happens for, or all files?
Any specific file types, ZIP, EXE etc?
Does it happen also for small downloads?
Do the downloads ever finish, if so have you noticed anything special as is completes?
Are you able to give an example for such a file?
If you do a speed test in Vivaldi, does also it give a bad result?
Have you tested in other Chromium-based browsers, like Chrome, Brave, Opera, Edge etc?
Have you tested this in a clean Vivaldi profile?
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tools/user-profiles/
Have you done the necessary troubleshooting steps?
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/troubleshoot/troubleshooting-issues/

The only thing I can think of that would do this is some kind of malware-scanning proxy. These often give a "slow drip" of bytes to the client to avoid timeouts, while it downloads, unpacks and scans the file. It will then send the file locally to the client, making it suddenly jump massively in speed for the last seconds.

snlj

@pathduck This is great, thanks!

Downloads under the clean profile result in expected speeds, so that's something!

The biggest differences I know exist between a clean profile and the one I use are extensions and ad/tracker blocking sources. I have gone through and disabled one at a time my various extensions (no impact on download speed) and modified my blocking sources to match those of the clean profile (also no impact on download speed).

I should note that it's not only the speed of the download which suffers, but also the amount of time it takes to even start the download once the sidebar pops open and the download shows up in the queue.

I can go through literally every other setting and try to match things up, but do you have any other thoughts before I commit to this?

Thanks again!

Karmillious

I also would like some help with this. I have tested a guest window and it downloads really quickly. Something about my profile makes the downloads slow to a crawl. I don't really want to toggle every possible option.

Karmillious

Well, after restarting, download speeds are now fast again. This issue had been happening for months, I don't know how restarting my browser fixed it.

Karmillious

Never mind, the issue is back out of seemingly nowhere. This issue still doesn't happen in a guest window, leading me to wonder what the problem is exactly.

Pathduck

@karmillious Something on your system is messing with Vivaldi, or something in your Vivaldi profile is seriously broken, maybe you've installed an extension that broke stuff or some antivirus/security software on your system is making this happen.

I asked a lot of questions above to the user, please read through them and ask yourself what might be the cause on your system.

And go through all the troubleshooting steps.
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/troubleshoot/troubleshooting-issues/

Karmillious

I think I figured out what it is. In "vivaldi://settings", changing the "safe browsing" setting from standard to off worked for me.

Karmillious

@karmillious Never mind, every time I think it works, some other site still has the slow downloads. I can't nail down any consistent pattern to why it happens. Could be because of too many bookmarks? I don't know. There are so many difference to test between a guest and user profile.

Karmillious

Okay not really a fix, but disabling ads and trackers fixed it for one specific website, but I have another device that works just fine with ads and trackers enabled on the same site. I still don't have any fixes, but these may be two possible fixes.

Edit: after re-enabling ads and trackers, it still works now. I have now idea how or why.

Karmillious

After almost two months, I finally figured out what the problem was. It was my cookies. After going through every setting between a fresh profile and mine, I didn't have any other choice but to reset the settings in "chrome:settings" under the advanced tab. I made a backup of my entire folder (just in case it didn't work), and as soon as it finished clearing my settings, all my pending downloads were finished. I tried every download that I had issues with, and they all worked. I hoped that the problem had been fixed, and I copied my old cookies file back into the new folder, and my download issue was back. Each download would stop at 0 bytes per second before completing. I could go through my cookies and try to find the problem, but with 4690 cookies from 3 years of use, I'm likely to just start over. I just wanted to post what finally worked for me.

Karmillious

Edit: Do not attempt to re-add anything to your profile directory; it took me two hours to fix what I messed up. I'm not sure that it was actually the cookies, even after deleting all of them, it still didn't work. I had reset the Chrome settings again.

ctrlalt

I had the same problem with the download speed, it took about 2 minutes to download 1.5mb of a 137mb file. I paused the Vivaldi download and used Opera and downloaded the same file in about 20 / 30 seconds - I went back and used Vivaldi and still had the same speed issue. I resolved the problem after a few minutes by flushing the DNS (ipconfig /flushdns) and now it works everytime, same speed as what I was getting on the other browser.

Have a good Christmas.
CRTL-ALT