Extremely slow download on Alto 6T

I have been having an issue downloading content from the movie store onto my Alto 6T. I posted about this in another thread related to UniFi network equipment, but figured it would have more visibility here.

Alto 6T connected by ethernet to Unifi networking equipment consisting of Unifi Dream Machine, Unifi POE switch, Wifi6 APs, WAN connected to XFinity 1.5G cable internet, and various other household devices via eithernet and WiFi.

Speedtest at the UniFi console shows nearly the full 1.5G down connection with 350M upstream. Wifi clients can achieve 900M downstream on WiFi network.

Currently attempting to download a single HD movie from the store that has been in my queue for 6+ hours, and after all that time its showing 3% complete. The status changes between totally stalled, and momentarily shows something extremely small for download rate (0.2M) with estimates of hundreds of hours for the download.

Ive attempted several troubleshooting steps including QOS prioritizing the Alto, using a known fast OpenVPN tunnel on the UDM console to bypass any throttling done by XFinity, tried using WiFi instead of ethernet, restarted all gear, removed the movie from the queue and restarted download, even attempted to use port forwarding to the Alto on all ports that KScape discloses are in use. Ive also tried connecting the Alto directly to the cable modem, which has a 4 port switch, and it easily gets and IP via DHCP and connects, but when the dowload continues its at the same excruciatingly slow rate.

None of the above changed the behavior at all, so Ive gone back to a basic network config and abandoned all other measures.

Ive reached out to KScape support and at this point they blame it on "varied performance depending on the usage of the Alto" as well as blaming Unifi network gear. The console has not been in use and is in standby all day today, and from reading other threads on this forum it seems like there are quite a few others who use UniFi with no issue.

Is there anything else I could be missing? Thank you for any advice.

Attached pic is after 6 hours in the queue.

Although not recommended, did you also try WiFi from the Alto?

Yes tried WiFi as well with exactly the same result. The Alto is 15' from the Access Point in direct line of sight. Very frustrating.

Maybe try another switch port or direct attachment to a port on the UDM.

Ive tried several switch ports on the UDM as well as the secondary switch. I also tried connecting directly to a switchport on my XFinity router, bypassing my UniFi network completely. I mentioned that in my original post as well.

Same behavior on WiFi as well.

Any possibility of an IP address conflict? Doubtful based on what you have described. Also check the store as I assume no speed limit sets or pause etc.

Appreciate the suggestions but no IP conflict as I am using a static address with no other device using it, and no speed limit on the store.

However, after about 8 hours of sitting still, it suddenly took off and finished downloading in about 20 minutes at over 100Mb/s. This has been my experience with other movies as well where they sit forever, then suddenly finish. I am at a loss...

Wonder if it is doing K background tasks or something, but surely not for that amount of time. Maybe one of your movies has an issue with its cover or other internal things. You should ask K to at least look at your Alto logs.

crizz said:

Appreciate the suggestions but no IP conflict as I am using a static address with no other device using it, and no speed limit on the store.

However, after about 8 hours of sitting still, it suddenly took off and finished downloading in about 20 minutes at over 100Mb/s. This has been my experience with other movies as well where they sit forever, then suddenly finish. I am at a loss...

Click to expand...

Probably won’t help, but you may want to switch to using DHCP and setting a reservation in your network. I’m not an expert, but this seems to ensure getting the latest network info from your system. Easy to do in Unifi.

I believe you mentioned this on the other thread, but I just want to be extra double-sure: you’re not interacting with the Alto’s onscreen display or the browser interface during the download, correct? And there’s not a movie paused on the player, right? Checking progress via the mobile app or the store website is totally fine, but interaction with the player will slow things to a crawl.

crizz said:

I have been having an issue downloading content from the movie store onto my Alto 6T. I posted about this in another thread related to UniFi network equipment, but figured it would have more visibility here.

Click to expand...

There's a known issue with downloads to Altos we're (Engineering) investigating where the system can take an inordinate amount of time trying to reserve the disk space required for the currently queued download. The problem is particularly prevalent on Altos that have had content cycled in and out (i.e. deleting movies to make more space for new downloads).

We believe we have a fix for this issue and are running it through internal testing and validation. It is, however, a fairly low-level change and thus the amount of testing required is extensive. Therefore, I can't provide any sort of meaningful timeline on when this fix will roll out to production other than to say it is a high-priority fix.

In the meantime, when a download gets stuck on an Alto, I've found that sometimes one of the following can help unstick it. If you have multiple movies in your download queue, move a different movie to the top of the queue. In my testing, this would often get things moving again. The more drastic method was to reboot the Alto to try to unstick the download. Unfortunately, the reboot method was only successful about 50% of the time.

Thanks, John. I didn't know about that one.