Live Update - How many times to run?

[AirBorne]

I've been running it for like 10 times already and it always shows the Download Progress Bar doing something, I'm confused about when it's gonna end or what.

[virtuali]

We posted many updates.

And, there seems to be some problem with Cloudflare (yesterday it went down worldwide), that some files we send appear late, and this will look like as if files needs to be downloaded again, even if they are already updated.

[AirBorne]

Looks like there was nothing to download, but the progress bar was active everytime, which lead into some confusion. Maybe the interface could be changed in order to only show the download progress bar when something is effectively being updated (downloaded).

[pete_auau]

if it  says  completed  on the  bottom  right  than  you know  its  finished

[AirBorne]

Yes, complete for that cycle, but sometimes you need to run again for another layer of updates to be downloaded. They don't come all at once, necessarily.

[virtuali]

It's not like that and it's not a problem of the Updater.

In order to be as fast as possible, the Updater doesn't check files online against your local files, that would be very slow and would waste a lot of bandwidth, since there are tens of thousands of them to check for, and checking them one by one would be silly.

Instead, a catalog of files and their MD5 hashes is downloaded, and the comparison with your installed files is made locally, only going online to download the outdated files.

We don't obviously use a single server, it would surely crash under load as soon we had an update if we did, and it would waste too much bandwidth. We use Cloudflare ( like half of the whole Internet ) for caching, and there are about 170 Cloudflare servers spread around the world and, when we change even a small file, they are supposed to be automatically synchronized.

For some reason, this catalog doesn't seem to update on all Live Update servers at the same time and sometimes some servers gets stuck with the old version, even if we explicitly purge it from the cache.

Add to this, the problem that happened, guess what, exactly in the middle of our big update, and was that Cloudflare went down all over the world for about half an hour, shutting down millions of websites. It's POSSIBLE this might have affected the global synchronization we need to work correctly, to have the Updater updating everything it needs, and not updating what is already updated.

When the catalog is outdated, the Updater will think your local files are not the right version (even if they are), so it will download them again. So, it's not the Update comes "in pieces", it's just the catalog is not always fully updated, which results in files downloaded again, even if there was no need for.

We obviously contacted Cloudflare support about this problem, asking for help but, they are NOT as fast as FSDT in replying... especially considering the outage they had the other day so, first we must wait 24 hours to get a standard reply, then we must wait another 24 hours to have a real person answering, and hopefully they will find the solution.

None of this would happen if we ran the Live Update without caching on a single server. But, it would be unbearably slow, if not crashing altogether under load after a new release, and it would waste so much bandwidth ( which we pay for ) that the bandwidth bill would either put FSDT out of business, or we would have to put a price on updates.

Since both of these two outcomes are clearly not very appealing, I guess we must live with the added complexity of multiple servers and caching.

[AirBorne]

No need to get into the technicalities, I just got confused because things were being downloaded time after time, it even happens with Microsoft Windows, sometimes one update is not enough, you have to do the update 2, 3 or more times in a row because some things are prerequisite to others, thus they will be downloaded and installed in layers.
Anyway, the green download progress bar in the lower part of the window is pretty much what confused me, because it stays continually getting from zero to 100%, so many times during the cycle, even if it's not actually doing any update.
Humberto, is it possible to refrain from updating the sound files? Some of us use customised sounds and it would be interesting the leave the sounds alone, otherwise we have to install them all over again after the GSX update.
Also, on more question: what does this message mean? OrbX compatibility fix for KLAS restored successfully - Since I don't you FSDT KLAS scenery I can't see why it's showing, I used the scenery in the past but nowadays I use FlyTampa's, so the FSDT one has already been uninstalled.
Thanks!

[virtuali]

is it possible to refrain from updating the sound files? Some of us use customised sounds and it would be interesting the leave the sounds alone, otherwise we have to install them all over again after the GSX update.

As explained so many times on the forum, you can create an empty file called DONTUPDATE, place it in any folder, and it will prevent that folder to be updated.

Please not that, we STRONGLY disagree with this practice, because we always make changes to our files, and a lot of problems in the past were caused from users that placed DONTUPDATES everywhere, and these can be very difficult to find.

An example about the sound files: there's a popular replacements sounds files for GSX that has silenced many waves, to lower the frequency of the "hello" of the passengers, leaving only about 15% of them active to achieve that goal. But the latest GSX update has *already* reduced frequency of the passengers hellos by 90% so, it's clear that replacement sound set should be updated too, since the silencing of so many waves is not required anymore. But if you placed a DONTUPDATE, you'll get the two changes at the same time.


[quopte]Also, on more question: what does this message mean? OrbX compatibility fix for KLAS restored successfully - Since I don't you FSDT KLAS scenery I can't see why it's showing, I used the scenery in the past but nowadays I use FlyTampa's, so the FSDT one has already been uninstalled.[/quote]

It's likely because the KLAS uninstaller ( like any other uninstaller ) removes the file IT has installed, but not the OrbX compatibility fix, which you installed manually so, the updater assumed you still had KLAS installed. It's best if you remove the Addon Manager\FSdreamteam\KLAS scenery folder manually