Slow loading. Is this normal?

[Phergus]

So I'm able to play now and this is cool but whenever I go to a new area it can take a half-hour or more to load game data. The server is showing almost no CPU use, memory use is well under half of physical, network use is fairly constant but a slow 1 Mb/sec or less. The PCs all have Gigabit ethernet and hooked to a Gigabit switch. Are there performance tunings/settings for the database servers?

[Phergus]

Answering my own question again...

So I have found out that the clients are getting game data (I'm guessing graphics and so forth) from Blizzard and not the local server. The bad speed is because my internet service is satellite-based (HughesNet) and just generally sucks. The real bummer about this is that my connection is metered. We only get 17 GB of data per month. A big chunk of that got sucked up just downloading the server and client software. Thank goodness that my current period ends today.

So is it entirely up to the clients to grab this data? Can any of the standalone servers handle downloading the data and then redistributing it to the clients?

I see this file in the client dir: WoW.mfil


server=akamai
location=http://dist.blizzard.com.edgesuite.net/wow-pod-retail/NA/15890.direct/
server=limelight
location=http://llnw.blizzard.com/wow-pod-retail/NA/15890.direct/
manifest_partial=wow-18414-447E3E618F731CCBF4F7D2C4E56C5644.mfil

Can it be changed to use the local server?