After filling the PS4 hard drive with a ton of F2P schlock, I’m pretty sure I understand what’s going on. It doesn’t matter if the download is in the foreground or not. All that matters is what programs are running in general.
- If there’s an online game (or badly written single player game) running, the speeds will get cut by a factor of 100.
- If there’s any app (e.g. Netflix, Youtube, etc) or other kind of game running, the download speeds will be cut by a factor of 5.
Doesn’t matter if they’re active, or even if the machine is in rest mode. If there’s something else than the download running, the PS4 will artificially slow down the download.
It’s really stupid that background apps / games would have any effect. And it’s made worse by the PS4 making it hard to figure out what’s running, and apps possibly being running on power-up due to having been suspended when going to rest mode.
For all the tedious details: