microsoft
Why are artifact downloads so slow?
Describe the issue The download of artifacts has become a lot slower. I see 100-200Mbit max When creating a new container it became even more obvious as a new image was also pulled and that downloaded at the limit of the network (for me that's 1Gbit). For a single new container that might not matter much, but for CICD it adds a lot of time.
Screenshots
Script
New-BCContainer -containerName $container -Credential $credential -artifactUrl (Get-BCArtifactUrl -country $country) -acceptEula $true -auth UserPassword
Internal work item: AB#579986
I suspect it's due to some limit on the storage accounts that the artifacts are stored on. We do have a Front Door in front of the storage account that caches some requests. But... If your request doesn't hit the cache, then it probably won't help much performance-wise.
I'll investigate if there's anything we can tweak to make the download speeds faster.
That being said, I'm not aware of any reason the download speed should've gotten slower recently (compared to earlier). If you have any more insights on this, you could share that would be appreciated. If not, I'll see what I can dig out from the storage account telemetry.
I did a bit of testing, and now it seems to be consistent at 250-300Mbit for repeated downloads, which is a little better. Probably as you say, a question of whether I'm the first to request that specific file from my pop. I don't have anything to back up my claim that "it was better before", I'm maybe just getting old and grumpy😜 But the difference between download of the artifacts and the image is significant.
Don't spend too much time on it. There would be at best less than a minute gained from going "full speed".
For reference, I have the same issue - and I use the same (NAV) artifacts on a regular basis.
Downloading artifacts has become increasingly slow and inconsistent recently, often failing or taking several minutes to complete.
