Hi everyone,

I am having an issue where one of my PCs will download very slowly using GOG galaxy, averaging around 5MB/s, but jumping between 1MB/s & 15MB/s. I recently realised that if I download from another PC on my network that gets 50MB/s. I have a gigabit internet connection for the whole house.

The slow PC is on a wired connection and the faster PC was using WiFi, but I have tested the troublesome PC on WiFi as well. Downloading from steam will also run at similarly high speeds on all PCs, including the one with the issue in GoG galaxy.

Speedtest also of course returns the expected speeds.

Would love to know if anyone has had this issue and may have found a solution that is not to just reinstall Windows.

Things I have tried:

- Reverting to default windows drivers for ethernet;
- Installing latest drivers from motherboard website;
- Installing latest drivers from ethernet chipset website;
- Switching to WiFi;
- Disable firewall;
- Add GoG to firewall exceptions;
- Reinstall GoG Galaxy;
- Adding & removing a speed limit in GoG Galaxy.

That will download quicker, sure, but I would rather not have to download all the parts of the offline installer manually. Especially for bigger games like Baldurs Gate 3 or Plague Tale. I'd really rather not have to download 20 odd files through my browser.

It also starts to become fiddly since for those bigger titles I actually need to change my browser download location to so that I actually have space to store it. It also means I need twice as much available space to download then install instead of installing directly.

Especially for larger games I would really like it to just work properly if I am honest.

If GOG had a tracker like Humble, that would solve both problems, but since when has GOG ever chosen the sensible option? Used to be that there was a Downloader that was quite effective in situations like this.

If you don't have enough storage on your computer, then buy an external drive, plug it in, and save directly to it as you download the installer parts, and then install from the external drive. It's a system that works just fine.

If all you want is to do install as you download, then honestly, why are you NOT on Steam, instead of GOG?

Because I want to support a DRM-free system and I thought GOG is the best way to support that. I have plenty of games that I do keep the installers for, but for larger games I would prefer the convenience of installing directly.

Galaxy is also, as far as I am concerned, the easiest and most convenient way to get the installers, so it not working is really not a good experience.

I download installers to an external HDD, and I install from the external HDD.
I keep all downloaded versions of installers that I have downloaded, this means if an update totally hoses a game, I can do a reinstall of a proper working version.

I support GOG because I believe that the software you buy, you own a copy of. Not lease. Not access. OWN.
I also support GOG because DRM is deliberate consumer rights removing pre-meditated evil, baked in by deliberate malicious design.

I support the service for the same reason you do, but I was posting here in the hopes that someone would help me solve my issue and NOT to tell me that I am using the service wrong.

They provide the launcher and I want to use it both to install games and to download offline installers because it is a much better experience than having to manually download 28 files through a webpage.

I do and will continue to support GOG because I believe in their cause, but I was hoping that the community would be more welcoming of me trying to use the service the way I want using the tools provided by GOG and maybe try to help solve the issue to improve my experience rather than tell me I should do things differently.

How are we supposed to help you without flying to Oz and getting out a Telecom network protocol analyzer? That's not me being smart, that's me being as pragmatic as possible given the laundry list of things you've already tried.

Cause, short of using CURL or wget on a direct download, wouldn't know much else where to go.

The thing is, answers in the case of slow downloads are certaintly not a clear-cut thing. Factor in there's a great deal of the community here which doesn't like to use Galaxy at all, and, well, I'm sure you can appreciate the chances of a large number of people offering specific advice is going to be slim. And you've already done some troubleshooting yourself, so some questions are already answered.

Specifically you've tried two (in theory, hardware) connections. Both result with slow connection on the PC. Steam works fast, Galaxy runs slow. But another machine on the same network runs fast with Galaxy.

So logically it would seem it's Galaxy on the slow machine, but it might be other software interfering with it. You've fiddled with your firewall to no avail, tried reinstalling Galaxy.

Maybe:
- Try purging Galaxy's cache (deleting it's temp files & configs)?
- Try turning off IPv6?
- Try reinstalling the VC++ dependencies Galaxy requires?

Hello, You've been very thorough. I'm sorry to say this might just be a consequence of them switching CDNs, which seems to have made things worse for Australians. See Gog download speeds. In any case, don't even think about reinstalling your OS from scratch for a problem specific to GOG Galaxy.
If you haven't already, open a support ticket, and zip up and attach C:\ProgramData\GOG.com\Galaxy\logs to it. You have no obligation to respond to replies you find unhelpful.

If you don't have any ideas that might help with my current problem then I'd just like you to say that, or simply not respond.

I know I can download manually, but I really wanted galaxy to work because it is so much more convenient. I was hoping for any suggestion that wasn't just to reinstall windows but that seems to be the only option I really have left.

Do you have some different kind of "security suite" (virus scanner, firewall etc.) on the slow PC, compared to faster PC?

In the past I recall people reporting download speed issues due to some ill-behaving virus scanner or such that for some reason takes Galaxy and its downloads under scrutiny, slowing down the download speeds.

I don't think I have faced such problems myself but then I rarely use Galaxy.

Galaxy being a problem looking for a place to happen on users is a massively long standing well known problem, that GOG never solved in Galaxy 1.x.
In Galaxy 2.x things were made worse, due to 2.x being alpha grade code being forced on the userbase as a 'Public Beta'.
To thoroughly and comprehensively cap things, in recent months, the download speeds for GOG, have hovered between abysmal and literally unusable. There are already multiple threads on this issue.

Right now, until the slow-down is fixed by GOG, downloading the offline installers and installing from them, is the best and safest method. Even then, expect it to take DAYS to get a full set of installers for a game. That is honestly how lousy the download speeds are for everyone, globally. Wanting to install as you download, right now, that's damned well insanity.

You're right, I probably shouldn't have but I've been particularly frustrated trying to solve this because this kind of issue just nags at me until it's solved, which has compounded the matter.

I think I'm going to do an OS reinstall, since I found out that, ironically, the windows media creation tool was having the same issue. 3mbit/s on my desktop, 700 on my laptop... so probably some weird issue with the OS or other conflicting software. Probably due a fresh install anyway.