Free Download Manager 5, which like Galaxy, can also download using multiple threads per file, works the same for me.

I have a 10 Megabyte per second connection, and using FDM5 I can get up to 7 Megabytes a second download speed from GOG.

However, Galaxy will normally download all the parts for that game in parallel so you don't have to click on each part separately in order to initiate a new download thread for each part. Galaxy does that automatically.

I recall seeing some exception to that rule, I think it was Metro Exodus or somesuch which for some reason offered each part as a separate download link in Galaxy. Not sure if that is still the case.

Maybe, Maybe not. I guess we won't know for sure unless you try.

Well route definitely seems to be a factor, and your route would not be identical for the final portion, when using that same server.

I'm not convinced that GOG are puzzled.

Remember, these speed issues really only started in mid 2023, immediately after the GOG CDN crash, when GOG came back online. Some kind of change occurred at that time.

I don't recall everything that was said by GOG back then, and they are not known for being forthcoming about everything. But I got the impression that data was lost, and they had to rebuild connections. There also seems to be a reasonable amount of evidence, that GOG have been cost cutting for a while now, since just before that time. One can of course dream up a conspiracy theory, or just guess that to fix things fully, was too costly.

Yes it is possible they e.g. changed to some other CDN provider because of that crash, maybe it was their backup CDN or I am not sure.

However, I am not convinced there is some malicious intent by GOG where they intentionally slowed down download speeds (specifically for web browser downloaders), especially since not everyone seems to be affected. It just came to be, and I don't even know how GOG is supposed to test it by some Japanese customer reporting a speed problem; should they send a GOG employee to that Japanese town to test the download speed using the same Japanese ISP as that customer? Same for Australia.

We don't even know how widespread the speed issue is (do 60%, or 0.1%, or GOG users see it?), and it is also a bit mixed bag because people are at the same time reporting getting very slow speeds (like under 1 MBytes/sec), but also that they are getting e.g. 20 MBytes/sec over their 1Gbit connection (so I guess they are expecting to see 125 MBytes/sec download speeds from GOG then).

I can't say for sure if my download speeds got worse, better or the same after that crash. If anything, over time my GOG browser download speeds have just gotten better over the years, I recall many years ago occasionally getting only about 400kBytes/sec download speeds per file on GOG, but there was odd variance, some files would download much faster.

Nowadays I don't experience anything like that, I seem to get constantly around 20-34 MBytes/sec total download speeds with a browser, possibly depending on the time of the day. That 34 MBytes/sec is the highest I recall seeing e.g. during this year.

Having said that, I certainly seem to get even better offline installer download speeds with Galaxy, the last time I've tested it. Up to around 70 MBytes/sec. Oddly, downloading and installing a Galaxy version of the same game (ie. not an offline installer) gave somewhat slower download speed, around 50 MBytes/sec.

I am unsure what it means "data was lost". At least not in the sense that there were no backups either, as I don't see people reporting that they are now missing some games, or their account is gone for good.

If they had e.g. lost 10% of their game installers with no backups, then people would certainly report it here that those games can't be downloaded anymore. I would have noticed it as well with gogrepo.

Recovering tens of terabytes of data can certainly take a sweet time. I have to deal with recovering backups at my work, and with one backup system I'd estimate it would take two or more days to recover e.g. a virtual machine with a 3 TB /data drive, and for recovering a 2.5 TB database. it took 34 hours in all to recover it when I tested it.

I don't even want to think how long it could take to recover e.g. 100 TB worth of data from any kind of nightly backup system, if we estimate that is the size of GOG's game database at the moment.

There was some mention, I believe, that the Fastly CDN used to be their backup, but is now their main source ... at least for those of us not using Galaxy.

I'm not claiming it is deliberately malicious, it could just be the result of finances and cutbacks and or lost data etc.

The fact of the matter though, is they have had a lot of complaints since, and they know what was in place before the crash, and what is in place now after the crash. That is inescapable logic.

You do have to consider that their Galaxy push, could also mean a deliberate factor. Some would call that malicious I guess, but it may be down to level of control. We know how poorly the site can behave during big sales. Maybe Galaxy gives them a way to reduce the load on their servers.

There is no way for us to tell how many are impacted, but the complaints are ongoing, and not always the same customers.
Only GOG would have some clue about how many are impacted.

How many, I wonder, gave up on using GOG because of the poor download speed connection?
Not everyone, perhaps not the majority, would have bothered to post in the forum.
It is a normal expectation to presume a good download speed.
A poor download speed, says something about the site you are downloading from. That is also inescapable logic.

Some folk, as you say though, have unrealistic expectations. I have only seen a small number of posters like that.

For a week or so after that CDN crash, when GOG came back online, I was getting something like 204 Kilobytes a second download speed, when previously I was getting around 5 Megabytes a second. Around another week later, things improved to the point where many of us now get around 1 Megabyte a second or just over, and often under. On a good day or time now, I can get between 1.3 to 1.4 Megabytes a second. If I use about 5 threads I can get around the speed I used to get. That reasonable speed was what I had experienced with GOG for years, the majority of the time, and with a single thread.

Some folk seem to have a reduced speed, that doesn't impact them much.
While others like myself, are terribly impacted.
Even when I doubled the speed of my connection several months ago, it made no difference to the lousy download speed I was getting. That tells me, that something is definitely limiting my speed to a specific speed, not percentage. And the fact I can overcome that by using multiple threads, tells me it is unlikely my ISP at fault ... they certainly don't give me issues with other sites. But it would be a massive leap to blame my ISP anyway, as many others around the world are having the same problem, and they use a different ISP ... the coincidence would clearly be too much, as it would be with the timing of the crash.

Been a while since I last tried Galaxy, and it would only be a try if I did, as I certainly wouldn't continue to use it, even if my download speed was much better. Galaxy doesn't offer the control I want, and there are other methods to get your games from GOG, with Free Download Manager 5 appearing to be the best by my experience.

Any limiting going on seems to be to a single download thread. Use multiple threads and download speed improves.

Think about it in the context, that once upon a time, GOG used to host their data on a server near me, which is why I used to get a good speed, but now don't. Is that because it was lost due to the crash, or because maybe they are cost cutting?