do i have to keep downloading the offline installer? if i run the updater immediately after downflowing the offline installer it still downloads loads of files over and over. is this because the servers are behind?
Please clarify what do you mean with "loads of files over and over".
As explained in other posts, SOME files ARE supposed to be downloaded "over and over", and those are the two ZIP files for the Airport Services and the Jetways Sceneries, those are always downloaded, because we found it was faster to just download them then checking each file one by one on your system to see which one are outdated.
If you see OTHER files downloaded over and over, that seems to indicate a problem with your cloudflare node and, as clearly indicated in the first post here, that will tell you need to use the Offline Installer, until you node catches up.
in which case doesn't the updater check versions before downloading OOD files?
This seems to be a difficult concept to graps:
The Live Updater is working perfectly and it ALWAYS check your local files against the one on the server so, fact is trying to downloaded them again "over and over", it's because it KNOWS your files are outdated, so it tries to download the latest version. The problem is the cloudflare node that doesn't
serve the latest version, because it doesn't have it yet, since not doing what is supposed to do: download it from our own server and cache it for the next user.
We contacted Cloudflare support about this, they first replied after 5 days and, from their reply, I gathered their caching/purge system wasn't really designed to handle a release with more than 25.000 files that were supposed to be updated worldwide all at the same time. After a few email exchanges with support, they published this service note:
https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/p3dg0d2gyrjdWhich seems to indicate that yes, they DID had a problem with getting updated files in some regions, and have released a fix but, it's likely the refresh in the affected areas would start only after this fix, not counting the past 12 days after GSX release.