New China Download System Test

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We're attempting to address our ongoing connection speed issues in China by contracting with a China-specific content distribution network, whose servers are behind the Great Firewall and distributed throughout China and should offer fantastic transfer speeds almost everywhere in China. But we'd like to make sure that this system actually delivers good results for our users before forking over a bunch of money for it, so we're doing some user testing before we sign them.

We're going to roll this out on iOS too if it works, but since the connectivity problems seem to be more severe on Android we thought we'd try it on that first. (so don't bother registering your ID if you're an iOS user)

So if you're interested in trying out our new China download system, go to:

http://www.pleco.com/ancndltest.html

and enter the Registration ID from your copy of Pleco in the form. That ID appears at the top of the Pleco "Settings" screen; if you don't have an ID yet, open the handwriting recognizer module in the main screen and you'll be offered a free copy of that, which will give you an ID.

Then, kill and reopen Pleco (via Settings / Applications) and go back into Add-ons and your download requests will now be directed to the new system.

Please post feedback here after you've tried a download or two - if everything's configured correctly then you should be seeing transfer speeds as fast as someone in the US, even for very large files like our extended audio add-ons. (we'd welcome feedback from people who've already downloaded all of their add-ons too, but if you're in that category you'd have to delete them before you can re-download them)

Note that this does not apply to the initial Pleco startup file download yet - if we adopt this system officially it certainly will, though.
 

Thomas

Member
Hi!
I just try this on my device and it's downloading pretty fast :wink: .
Now it's 7pm (the network is slower in the evening) and I downloaded these two things:

-Audio Pronunciation (Male) 8.7Mo ~ 10seconds
-CFDICT 22.5MB ~ 30/40seconds

Which web hosting are you using in China?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thomas said:
I just try this on my device and it's downloading pretty fast .
Now it's 7pm (the network is slower in the evening) and I downloaded these two things:

-Audio Pronunciation (Male) 8.7Mo ~ 10seconds
-CFDICT 22.5MB ~ 30/40seconds

Cool, thanks!

Thomas said:
Which web hosting are you using in China?

Not hosting, just a new CDN - we actually can't get our own hosting account in China since we don't have an ICP number.
 

alex_hk90

状元
I just tried this from here in Shanghai and it took under 3 minutes to download the 10.3 MB update for the CC-CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
alex_hk90 said:
I just tried this from here in Shanghai and it took under 3 minutes to download the 10.3 MB update for the CC-CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary.

Glad to hear it! Sounding more promising then after some initial issues...
 

Daan

秀才
Are you now using ChinaCache? I noticed last week that their CDN, though quite fast in China, is extremely slow when its traffic has to cross the Great Firewall. Using a Dutch 10mbit internet connection, I was downloading a file from the 新世纪 site that was only available from ChinaCache and it literally went at <10kb/s speeds. So it may be a good idea to double-check that users outside the GFW never get redirected to ChinaCache. (They claim to have servers in the USA as well, but apparently the system isn't particularly smart about picking the closest, fastest server available.)
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Daan said:
Are you now using ChinaCache? I noticed last week that their CDN, though quite fast in China, is extremely slow when its traffic has to cross the Great Firewall. Using a Dutch 10mbit internet connection, I was downloading a file from the 新世纪 site that was only available from ChinaCache and it literally went at <10kb/s speeds. So it may be a good idea to double-check that users outside the GFW never get redirected to ChinaCache. (They claim to have servers in the USA as well, but apparently the system isn't particularly smart about picking the closest, fastest server available.)

Yes, and you're quite right about that - we use IP geolocation (which works quite well with Chinese IPs because of the GFW) so our server gives your copy of Pleco a different URL to download each file from depending on where you're located. Even if there weren't a speed issue, we'd probably want to do that for cost-saving reasons, since CC costs more than our other CDNs.
 

hunghey

Member
A huge improvement! I'm on a 2MB China Unicom internet package split between my university campus so naturally it's not as speedy as I would like it, but the "Extended Audio (male)" 224MB file downloaded in 10~ minutes.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
hunghey said:
A huge improvement! I'm on a 2MB China Unicom internet package split between my university campus so naturally it's not as speedy as I would like it, but the "Extended Audio (male)" 224MB file downloaded in 10~ minutes.

Great! Thanks for the report.
 

HedgePig

举人
I'm in Shanghai and had a full reinstallation of Pleco two days ago (not actually sure why this was required but it had happened automatically on start up!) The whole process, including the large, extended male and female voice files, took about 2 hours minutes overall. I had problems connecting to the server initially. However I think all of these problems were due to my poor LAN wireless connection. When I switched to 3G, things proceeded much more rapidly - as they did when I switched back to the wireless LAN and moved closer to the router. So, overall, the download worked very well and I'm pretty sure any speed issues were my problem and nothing to do with Pleco.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
HedgePig said:
I'm in Shanghai and had a full reinstallation of Pleco two days ago (not actually sure why this was required but it had happened automatically on start up!) The whole process, including the large, extended male and female voice files, took about 2 hours minutes overall. I had problems connecting to the server initially. However I think all of these problems were due to my poor LAN wireless connection. When I switched to 3G, things proceeded much more rapidly - as they did when I switched back to the wireless LAN and moved closer to the router. So, overall, the download worked very well and I'm pretty sure any speed issues were my problem and nothing to do with Pleco.

Thanks! Strange about that reinstall - did the Pleco app itself disappear or did it just lose its add-on data files? Any other recent changes to your phone, like a firmware update?
 

HedgePig

举人
Hello Mike - thanks for your reply.

There were no changes to anything that I was aware of. The update happened when I tapped the Pleco icon to do some flashcard review - and it prompted me with an install message. I can't remember exactly what the message was but there was nothing indicating why the update was required.

My registration and purchase was remembered as I had no problem downloading the extra dictionaries, OCR, voicefiles, etc. However, I did lose my flashcard testing history. (I actually can't remember whether I had to reimport the flashcards as well.)

At the time I thought it might be because my beta-version of Pleco had expired (I seem to remember March as an expiry date for the Android Beta version I downloaded?). I had originally downloaded the free Pleco a few months ago and then I purchased it about 2½ weeks ago.

One thing I had done was copy across a text file via a USB cable from my laptop to my smartphone (Galaxy S2) and imported the cards, which progressed smoothly. I think I was still tethered at the time when the prompt came.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
HedgePig said:
One thing I had done was copy across a text file via a USB cable from my laptop to my smartphone (Galaxy S2) and imported the cards, which progressed smoothly. I think I was still tethered at the time when the prompt came.

Ah, that would actually explain the whole thing - we can't access files on your SD card while you're tethered. There's normally supposed to be an alert message telling you about that, though - do you happen to remember an alert coming up about your system being tethered? It works fine on our SGS2 here but perhaps there's something about your computer configuration that would cause problems.
 

HedgePig

举人
Apologies for overlooking your questions, Mike. No, I don't remember getting a message about my device being tethered. However, I don't recall for sure so it may have popped up and I foolishly ignored it.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
HedgePig said:
Apologies for overlooking your questions, Mike. No, I don't remember getting a message about my device being tethered. However, I don't recall for sure so it may have popped up and I foolishly ignored it.

OK, thanks!
 

gato

状元
Downloading from the Apple App Stores in China has been a lot faster recently. Most downloads I've tried lately have finished in 30 seconds or so, compared to many minutes or even hours before. I think Apple may have started using servers within mainland.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
gato said:
Downloading from the Apple App Stores in China has been a lot faster recently. Most downloads I've tried lately have finished in 30 seconds or so, compared to many minutes or even hours before. I think Apple may have started using servers within mainland.

Ah, good to know - makes me feel better about (probably) starting to bundle in CC-CEDICT and thereby increase our app download size to 30-40 MB.
 
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