Everything you want to know about Visual Studio ALM and Farming
Brian Harry is a Microsoft Technical Fellow working as the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server. Learn more about Brian.
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In my "questions..." post, I referenced a blog post by Richard Hundhausen detailing his bad experience using the Akamai download manager to get VS 2008. It appears it has been a very hot topic in the blogosphere. People have been working not stop to address the issues and we apologize for the problems. We are moving to both patch the issues in the Akamai download manager and to provide more of the content via the MSDN download manager. The problem, of course, is that we fear MSDN may not be able to handle all of the load so we are watching it carefully. Status I saw on Tuesday showed an average download rate of about 10 Gbps across all of our servers netting an average of 1,000 downloads per hour. That's a lot of bits flying across the wire.
Here is an excerpt of a response from the person at Microsoft responsible for the download infrastructure. It has been posted on many blogs/forums:
"…Hi, we have recognized the variety of issues that need improvement ASAP, and your inputs have been great. We NEVER want our customers to be exposed to the system failures on any kind, but even with best of intentions, some issues creep up. We are working on the revision to the (third party) DLM 2.2.2.1 and trying to get the fixes in over the weekend. In the mean time, most critical downloads have been posted to MSDN's download service, so please download what you need from the MSDN Subscriber Downloads.
Based on your feedback, we are trying to implement the fixes to the following:
- DLM should download to Downloads by default (Vista)
- the proxy issue that crashes the IE if proxy server is enabled but the address field is left empty
- Retry on downloads: we have seen that if your session expires (you lose your network connection because PC goes to sleep, for example, and your MSDN session expires) the downloads can’t be restored (we are looking in to this)
- DLM cannot be restarted if you close it and try again later (session issue again)
A new DLM will be coming soon, by the end on 11/07 at the latest, and we are trying to hurry it up as soon as possible.
We recognize the inconvenience this caused you and others who experience it. Thanks for your patience and support. We are doing all we can to make sure this does not happen again.
Thomas"
Again, we're sorry for the inconvenience.
Brian
PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2007/11/24/update-on-akamai-download-problems/
What's the reason to have yet another DLM (Akamai) in first place?
Hi Brian,
I guess I was lucky in that my download finished within the first session. Nevertheless, I certainly wasn't impressed by the experience.
Here's a little background on (my) customer perception of this issue:
*previously* Damn, that Visual Studio 2005 sure is popular, it is taking ages to download.
*now* WTF is Microsoft thinking, those incompetent $&%^#*. How could they ship a product like this?
See the difference? Slow downloads are annoying to be sure, but shipping crap (doesn't matter that it is third party crap) is inexcusable. (To be perfectly clear, by shipping crap I mean the DLM, not Visual Studio 2008.)
Regards,
Jeroen
While we're on the subject, why isn't Team Foundation Server available on MSDN? As far as I can tell, it's only available using the Akamia junkware.
Why is MSDN's download process so fubared? Don't you people care about how IT professionals perceive you?
I downloaded both VS2008 and Exchange Server, and each of them got "Interrupted" in the MS download manager after the whole file was complete, during the "Validation" step. Guess what: even if you restart the download, it pulls the whole 4 gigs down again, despite the temp file already sitting there with all the bits.
I could write a better download manager in a week or two, and it wouldn't need the Java runtime like Akamai's. Downloading a file over HTTP is not actually difficult, even with some transient network errors. Why can't a big company like Microsoft get something this trivial right? You've had years to fix it.
All I can do is appologize for the experience. Clearly we didn't test it well enough. I don't even think very many people in the division knew we were doing it until customers started reporting problems. The reason we did it was because MSDN didn't have enough bandwidth to handle the load we expected. Again I'm sorry and we are working hard to fix it as fast as we can.
We have finally basically given up on trying to download VS2008 Pro via our VALID MSDN subscripion because of the totally CRAP download manager.
We have had 4 Download sessions going to beyond 2 to 3 GIGs and then crashing / failing to resume. This has been going on since Friday last week... Firstly it would report a 'Critical error'. Bang end of story... Retry... Later no more critical error, but it would not allow you to resume...
We are paying for bandwidth by the Gig in our country and this has been a very costly exercise.
Why in the hell Microsoft did not allow TRIED and TESTED commercial third party download managers to be used is beyond me.
Why all the 'hype' about the release of the RTM and then you cannot download it ??????
"Again I'm sorry and we are working hard to fix it as fast as we can."
Something Microsoft could do *immediately* would be to place all the Akamai-only downloads into MSDN. Right now, Team Foundation Server is only available through the broken Akamai software. Copy it to the MSDN subscriber downloads so that people can get it that way.
I have to agree with Gecko and others: considering Microsoft's resources, both download managers (MSDN and Akamai) are an embarrassment. There are free tools which are far superior.
Guys, a download manager is *not* a complex piece of software. It is embarrassing that Microsoft has been using the same buggy tool on MSDN for many years now -- and this Akamai "alternative" isn't winning any friends.
Late last week, we did move the 3 largest downloads from Akamai back to the MSDN "Xena" download system. These 3 large downloads is where most of the problems were occuring for people. Based on data I saw yesterday, people are being much more successful with downloads now.
Clearly this has been a bad experience for a bunch of people and I'm truely sorry for that. I beleive we've taken steps to alleviate the problem for now and will work hard not to repeat it next release.
If you are still having problems downloading, let me know.
So you've moved the downloads back to the MSDN system, which means that I now can't download *anything* from there. I get a message from the Transfer agent thing that says "The response from the website is missing required information". This occurs for multiple client machines for multiple different files.
Is there no way of separating the infrastructure so that VS 2008 is slow, as expected, but at least the rest of the downloads *work*?.
What a farce. Completely consistent with the MSDN subscriber experience though.
Tom, can you please contact me directly via 425-707-7787? I would love to know more details about the download issues you are seeing so that we can (a) resolve them for you asap, and (b) minimize the risk for these issues to show again.
Many thanks,
Anna Lidman
Developer Division; Release Management and Regulatory Compliance
Microsoft needs to figure something out about subscriber downloads. You stopped shipping dvd's in the name of convenience and cost cutting.
I needed to downlaod the german version of vista to debug a problem for a customer of mine. I am getting around 15 k/s, the 2.5 gigabyte download is going to take 66 hours. This is costing me 3 days in productivity and charge time and a really unhappy customer.
1000 downloads an hour sounds impressive until you stop and gauge it against the several million MSDN developers who now have no choice but to use the download service.
Thanks for your feedback Mike. I have forwarded it to the appropriate people to look at. In your case, are you sure the download site is your limiting factor? 15 K/s is pretty slow. At home, I get much faster downloads from MSDN than that. Is it possible the bottleneck is in the network infrastructure somewhere?
I have done a clean install of Windows Ultimate 64-bit with IE 7 64-bit. I have no trouble with downloads except from MSDN. I do not appear to beable to get Akamai's download manager to install. I am unable to download anything from MSDN. I do I go about fixing the problem?
Thanks for your help,
John D. Earls
jdearls@msn.com
(972) 747-9018
Akamai downloader is a piece of !@#$ I cannot believe This program should even be allowed to be used.. i am trying to Download Adobe Premiere but Akamai is going sooo slow.. when it finally finished.. it refused to launch it.. so basically i am unable to download it! WTF?