Steam downloads at a fraction of the speed my other downloaders

[alwaysbechowder]

Not sure if this a networking problem or a Steam problem, but as per the title, steam is taking a looooooooong time to download games. Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, and Speedtests seem to be fine. What's up with that?

[emosun]

They are only going to seed you what they want in terms of speed. 

[minibois]

Huh, that's odd.. That Steam screenshot shows Mbps, not MBps..

Because usually it shows MBps and I would paste this:

Quote

Speedtest.net report speeds in Mb, which stands for Megabit. Steam reports speeds in MB, which stands for Megabyte.
1 byte consists of 8 bits, so 1MB = 8Mb, or in your case it's 1.6MB/36.6MB = 12.8Mb/292,8MB.

The speeds you're getting between the test and download line up, it's just a different way of representing the numbers.

But that does not seem to hold true now, since Steam is showing it differently..

Try going into the Steam settings to see what server(s) you have chosen

[alwaysbechowder]

Yeah, you can actually change how Steam displays your download speed in settings, so I tried to make the units match both examples. I've tried clearing my download cache and the region is correct so I'm out of ideas.
 

[mariushm]

Try changing your download region ...the London datacenter may be congested or your ISP may have routing issues.

Netherlands (Amsterdam or whatever) and Germany (Frankfurt or whatever) and to a lesser degree France should give you just as good speeds - these are locations with huge datacenters and peering agreements between ISPs so there should be a lot of bandwidth and you should be able to download super fast from any of those locations.

 

(may have to quit steam and restart it for downloads to resume using other location )

[alwaysbechowder]

24 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Try changing your download region ...the London datacenter may be congested or your ISP may have routing issues.

Netherlands (Amsterdam or whatever) and Germany (Frankfurt or whatever) and to a lesser degree France should give you just as good speeds - these are locations with huge datacenters and peering agreements between ISPs so there should be a lot of bandwidth and you should be able to download super fast from any of those locations.

 

(may have to quit steam and restart it for downloads to resume using other location )

So I ran it for a bit on both the NL and DE Frankfurt locations and they both seem to settle in at 1.6/1.5 Mbps. Good shout but doesn't seem to have fixed the issue.

[mariushm]

Oh ... in that case it may not be networking related... make sure you actually have free disk space on the drive you decided to download that game.

Steam may refuse to start downloading a 10GB file, if it can't pre-allocate 10 GB on the drive for it ... maybe by accident you ran out of disk space and don't realize it.

 

Try a free/trial VPN service just to see if your ISP is somehow traffic shaping the Steam downloads?

Here's a starting point : https://www.technadu.com/free-vpn-trial-no-credit-card-required/39434/

 

First suggested in the link above is supposed to give you a free 24h trial without you paying or entering credit card info, you just sign up for account and use it... so good for testing.

 

[alwaysbechowder]

Well the game eventually downloaded which tells me two things - 1) I appear to have had enough space on the drive and 2) that the game must've downloaded a bit faster than it appeared (Assassins Creed Syndicate which is 32,5GB game at 1.6 Mbps should have been closer to a few days but it actually finished in about 10 hours).

 

This makes sense because the peak download speed is now listed at 160 Mbps but I can't see when and for how long this speed was achieved so I don't know what I was doing when it happened. Is there any way to export a log of the complete download speed over time? 

 

I ended up going out so I haven't yet checked your suggestion regarding the ISP shaping the Steam download. I will take a crack at that tomorrow evening and report back. Thanks for the help everyone.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Might have been worth checking task manager to see if it concurs with the speed Steam was reporting.