"Regional download servers" in Steam is FAKE.

[TorMazila]

I live in Ukraine. In Steam I have 4 "download regions" in Ukraine according to 4 large cities - Kiev, Kharkiv, Lviv and Odessa (I leave out the topic how they are supposed to be named in English - 2 are named in Russian, 2 - in Ukrainian). And guess what?
NONE of them is located in Ukraine!

Traceroute clearly shows that one is somewhere in Europe and another is in Russia (and yes, 3 regions point to same European address).

What the duck?! If you don't have a server in "our beloved Honduras" then just don't write the misleading information and let me choose the "real" locations and wine "argh, no servers for poor people".

[TorMazila]

Origineel geplaatst door cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

What? Can you post the traces?

Sure (my router and ISP hops omitted).

Kyiv:
4 8 ms * * 213.227.192.124
5 8 ms 10 ms 9 ms 93.178.204.129
6 16 ms 13 ms 13 ms 213.130.29.38
7 54 ms 50 ms * mskix.valvesoftware.com [195.208.209.209]
8 62 ms 52 ms 55 ms 162.254.197.111
7-12MBytes/s for me.

Everything but Kyiv:
4 5 ms 4 ms 5 ms 213.227.192.124
5 5 ms 5 ms 5 ms 93.178.204.129
6 13 ms 13 ms 12 ms prjsc-ic-334928-war-b1.c.telia.net [62.115.161.125]
7 21 ms 23 ms 21 ms war-b1-link.telia.net [62.115.161.124]
8 36 ms 41 ms 38 ms ffm-bb1-link.telia.net [62.115.135.178]
9 39 ms 38 ms 38 ms ffm-b5-link.telia.net [62.115.114.89]
10 34 ms 35 ms 36 ms 151.139.84.3
11 36 ms 35 ms 36 ms 151.139.84.16
12 36 ms 34 ms 39 ms a10-slb002-sg.fr8.hwcdn.net [94.46.154.139]
13 39 ms 36 ms 37 ms map2.hwcdn.net [205.185.216.42]
3-5MBytes for me.

Thing is in Ukraine we have UA-IX traffic exchange ( https://www.ix.net.ua/en )and a couple of other IX's, we have google(youtube) cache servers and such attached to that exchanges...

[Muppet among Puppets]

It should be no problem.

I used servers in the atlantik.

[BossGalaga]

Origineel geplaatst door TorMazila:

I live in Ukraine. In Steam I have 4 "download regions" in Ukraine according to 4 large cities - Kiev, Kharkiv, Lviv and Odessa (I leave out the topic how they are supposed to be named in English - 2 are named in Russian, 2 - in Ukrainian). And guess what?
NONE of them is located in Ukraine!

Traceroute clearly shows that one is somewhere in Europe and another is in Russia (and yes, 3 regions point to same European address).

What the duck?! If you don't have a server in "our beloved Honduras" then just don't write the misleading information and let me choose the "real" locations and wine "argh, no servers for poor people".

The clue is in the word "REGION." A regional server isn't necessarily in your country. Valve doesn't have a server in every single country in the world. They have servers throughout the world in various countries that cover various other regions and countries.

[aiusepsi]

"Fake" is definitely a strong word. There aren't servers in all the regions in the list, and that goes for many more places than just those listed in Ukraine. There aren't any servers in "UK - Manchester", for example.

What the region is for is to guide the server selection algorithm in deciding which servers to connect to. It orders servers by load and proximity, using a sort of map of the connectivity of the Internet and the download region to work out how to weight proximity. To make that more concrete, here's the actual list of servers for the "UK - London" region:

https://api.steampowered.com/IContentServerDirectoryService/GetServersForSteamPipe/v1/?cell_id=4&max_servers=20

At the time of writing, first on the list are actual Steam servers in London, then CDNs run by third parties, then servers in Amsterdam and Paris. I say at the time of writing, because earlier today I was seeing US Chicago and Washington come up, probably because they were less loaded than the European servers at the time, so it was advantageous to look West rather than East.

The connectivity map is here: https://github.com/SteamDatabase/SteamTracking/blob/master/ClientExtracted/steam/cached/CellMap.vdf

And you can see how displayed region names map to cellid, so you can have a play with the GetServersForSteamPipe API seeing what is returned for various cellids. From what it looks like, the main effect currently of selecting places in Ukraine other than Kiev is that it ends up placing the CDNs higher in the list than they are in Kiev.

Kiev: https://api.steampowered.com/IContentServerDirectoryService/GetServersForSteamPipe/v1/?cell_id=73
Odessa: https://api.steampowered.com/IContentServerDirectoryService/GetServersForSteamPipe/v1/?cell_id=191

What servers you'll get when you hit the CDNs rather than a first-party Steam server is even more complex, because that will depend entirely on those CDNs. They may have edge servers very close to you or not, but it's going to vary a lot. I think what they're betting on is that if you're further away (in connectivity terms) from the big hubs where there are Steam servers, you'll be better served by the edge capacity of the CDNs because they'll be more likely to have servers close to you.

I probably also should mention for clarity that Steam tends to download from multiple servers; it basically keeps adding servers, working down the list, until it thinks your connection is saturated.

[TorMazila]

Origineel geplaatst door BossGalaga:

The clue is in the word "REGION." A regional server isn't necessarily in your country. Valve doesn't have a server in every single country in the world. They have servers throughout the world in various countries that cover various other regions and countries.

If they said "Russia 1", "Russia 2", "Europe", etc. - that would have been "regional".

But they state not just the country name but a city name while having NOTHING in hundreds of miles around, having no idea about routing of variety ISP's. With added fun like Kharkiv that effectively borders with Russia (yes, I know that often it has not much to do with IP routing) being directed to Europe server.

Origineel geplaatst door aiusepsi:

"Fake" is definitely a strong word. There aren't servers in all the regions in the list, and that goes for many more places than just those listed in Ukraine. There aren't any servers in "UK - Manchester", for example.

Maybe it is strong but if you don't have something and make people believe you do - it's called "fraudulent statement". And I bet there are multiple ISP's in UK, with varying connectivity outside the UK. And in the end we get "I'm getting low download speeds"

Origineel geplaatst door aiusepsi:

What the region is for is to guide the server selection algorithm in deciding which servers to connect to. It orders servers by load and proximity, using a sort of map of the connectivity of
the Internet and the download region to work out how to weight proximity.

It's not a "world of communism", it's a world of internet. And geography isn't much help for "best guess", measurements are. E.g. people in Georgia (Northern Caucassus) had traceroutes to Moscow via Paris (that's several times longer distance)

Origineel geplaatst door aiusepsi:

To make that more concrete, here's the actual list of servers for the "UK - London" region:

https://api.steampowered.com/IContentServerDirectoryService/GetServersForSteamPipe/v1/?cell_id=4&max_servers=20
The connectivity map is here: https://github.com/SteamDatabase/SteamTracking/blob/master/ClientExtracted/steam/cached/CellMap.vdf

Thank you for those links.
Geographically map looks like

             /               Kyiv           Kharkiv |   Russia
POLAND| Lviv                                     |
             \               Odesa                 /
              \---------------------------------------/

So, geographically, even if you think "the Kharkiv&Odesa traffic will get routed via Kyiv" (can happen, I have some BGP routing experience and know the major data carrier operators) - it's still a questionable idea to download things from Europe.

Origineel geplaatst door aiusepsi:

At the time of writing, first on the list are actual Steam servers in London, then CDNs run by third parties, then servers in Amsterdam and Paris.

CDN's are rented from third parties :), unlike google cache servers that are indeed run by the third parties at their premises.

For some reason when downloading from CDN - it was pushing traffic via a single connection.
So, that was the source of "low speed" and frustration :).

Steam client doesn't try to either open 2+ connections to a CDN or to connect to different CDN's/server regions at once; while downloading from its own servers results in multiple connections to multiple IP's from the same subnet (windows resource monitor easily shows this). And of course, there's no attempt to knowingly saturate my link (the "saturation" can be observable by monitoring response time increase; surely you can ask user "how much BW you think you have?" and try playing from that point).

With CDN's there can be other "moments" - like Steam pays for an amount of traffic/storage.

Guess, I'm going to try playing with hosts file or dnsmasq - put IP's from different sources to every steam server name and "we'll see what happens"(c) D. Trump. (should be good till the changes happen to the IP's/names)