I used to get the Live Update in under a minute. Recent updates needed several minutes to download. Yesterday (around 2021-07-01T00:10Z), it took over an hour... I missed my tournament, of course. Today (around 2021-07-01T23:22Z), I made sure to launch the client an hour earlier. There was another update that took 59 minutes to download (124.53 MB at ~35KB/s average speed). At the end of the download this EBUSY error appeared:
The restart caused a re-download from scratch. Instead of waiting for another hour, I decided to search for any new temp files that may contain the update that I've been downloading for so long. I quickly found a temporary folder located at
%tmp%\updapp-play\ which was a copy of my entire BCP installation folder (C:\BlackChipPoker). The only differing file was
\resources\app.asar (the same one in the error msg above), so I copied it to my main dir at
C:\BlackChipPoker\resources\app.asar and the update was complete.
(This info might be useful for someone getting this error.)
Unfortunately, I still missed the tournament by 1 minute.
Anyone else having slower update speeds recently? I suspect that my internet connection is the main culprit. It hasn't been this unstable in a long time.
The download of the setup files from the web sites was at speeds above 3MB/s, though, and I didn't notice any other internet slowdowns at the time. I am talking about these files:
File: SetupAmericasCardroom.exe
Size: 104982266
SHA256: 547b900d3b0644185a051dfc5355f437d3739cd3a967bac391be76c2df1fcb2b
File: SetupBlackChipPoker.exe
Size: 65217512
SHA256: 4ccae2bf4625f0936715c1bdec0f8225f6aded32a1d036af2eb5f31d7c6e0cc0
Interestingly, the BCP installer is almost half the size of the ACR one, although the installations should take nearly the same size. Different compressions? I doubt. The BCP one may as well be incomplete/older.
Can we use such a setup file instead of the Live Update? Are they up to date? I tried to answer these questions by running the
SetupBlackChipPoker.exe and creating a second installation in a different folder. It gave me a different
app.asar:
app.asar 49,412,397 B (20-04-21 16:51:20) vs (21-07-01 10:24:53) 97,098,380 B app.asar (current)
It looks like the smaller and older
app.asar is the reason for the smaller Setup file. After I launched the
BlackChipPoker.exe from this second installation, it started the Live Update at some very slow speed, so the Setup files don't appear to be up to date and we can't use them as a faster alternative, unfortunately. The Live Update is downloading an archive called:
%tmp%\updapp-play.tar.gz
While the Setup files from the web sites were distributed thru a physically close Cloudflare reverse proxy in Vienna (heck the fast speeds for someone like me in EU), this file is being downloaded from an Amazon S3 endpoint at the US west coast (s3-us-west-1-w.amazonaws.com [52.219.120.82]). That's not optimal for some EU players surprised by an update. Even the extremely long late reg. won't be helpful when the connection drops after 2 hours of downloading and the downloaded file is truncated at 75% without an option for resuming, which was the case with the test update below:
I wish I knew from where the Live Update was downloading the files in the past, when I used to download them in a few seconds, so I could make a comparison. Were there any ACR Amazon S3 buckets in Europe?
