I think there is value looking into the "inside Spain vs outside Spain" angle. Many of these traceroutes have an increase in ping time starting when the connection gets from some ISP or backbone to the Spanish ISP or backbone. Also the user who reports no issues at all is the one inside Spain. I would be interested in seeing if the internal network computers running alpha, beta, regular, or testing units are seeing any issues like we are seeing. I would also be interested in seeing if any of the students or members of staff (etc) have PCs at home in Spain that could test the "inside Spain" theory for us outside of the local network. And perhaps it is the ISP within Spain that is just not good at the handoff to other ISPs through the backbones or some filtering method being used on the Spanish ISP networks for packet capture and analyzation. I would think that would more prevalent in places like Turkey, China, and Pakistan where it is a known issue that the government is tracking all the traffic in and out of the country to censor it, but maybe Spain has something in place that does something for some reason having this effect on our connections to the project???

I also do see different sounding reports from users within the same country, but on different ISPs or areas of that country. Some Comcast users in remote areas seeing increased issues than Comcast users in populated ares, but still reporting the issues are only with this project. I would wonder if some of those with the worst download and upload issues are also getting a greater number of failed tasks due to files that had dropped packets and seemed complete, but had some issue that caused the failures.

I will try the traceroute and downloading that file in both Firefox and BitCommet to see if there is any difference, failures, or interruptive delays.

One added thing I will add as an observation though is the increased reports of tasks that are listed for machines that do not have those tasks. I have one that has a delivery date of today on it to a computer that does not have that task on it. http://www.gpugrid.net/workunit.php?wuid=12186647 I wonder if this and the connection issue is also related, as a "tried to send" issue that one side (server) thinks it was sent and received while the other side (client) knows it got no such WU?

What about using a torrent program like BitComet or a download accelerator that can split the file into smaller pieces and reconstitute it outside of a browser constraint? Or even, is there the anonymous or passworded FTP option open for this location?

These do not matter, as the BOINC manager can use only HTTP (and HTTPS).