I killed a perfectly healthy 2 GB model download three times before I understood what was happening. Each time the same picture: the first 100–200 MB fly by in about a minute, then the progress bar freezes at 0 B/s. Not slow — zero. A minute passes. Five. Ten. Any reasonable person concludes the download is dead, kills the process, and tries again. And again the first 200 MB arrive instantly, and again everything stops.
The download was fine. I was being rate-limited, and everything about how that presents itself is designed — unintentionally, I assume — to convince you it's a hang.
The part where I blamed the VPN
My setup at the time went through a VPN, so naturally the VPN got blamed first. It's the obvious suspect: flaky route, dropped connection, MTU weirdness, pick your favorite.
But the evidence didn't fit, and it took me embarrassingly long to notice. The first burst always came through at full speed. A broken network path doesn't hand you 200 MB in a minute and then die at exactly the same point every retry. Broken networks are random. This was punctual. Whatever was stopping the download lived on the other end and had a policy about it.
