Steam doesnt display download speeds properly

[saaya]

Hey, just got a 100mbit connection, and i can download with close to that speed from FTPs, but steam seems to be stuck and never displays more than 10mbit. but it DOES seem to download with more than 10mbits... it just doesnt show it.

HDD speed is always higher than DL speed?
actual download speed is higher than what steam shows? (huge files download quickly)

Any ideas?

[Hanomaly]

are you sure you aren't confusing megabits and megabytes?

isps advertise their speeds in megaBITS.

however, by default Steam displays your download speed in megaBYTES.

100 megaBITS equals 12.5 megaBYES

so Steam might very well be properly using nearly all your bandwidth.

it is also possible your FTP program (like your ISP) is displaying megaBITS.

[saaya]

Originally posted by Hanomaly:

are you sure you aren't confusing megabits and megabytes?

isps advertise their speeds in megaBITS.

however, by default Steam displays your download speed in megaBYTES.

100 megaBITS equals 12.5 megaBYES

so Steam might very well be properly using nearly all your bandwidth.

it is also possible your FTP program (like your ISP) is displaying megaBITS.

yeah, my connection is 100 megaBITS
and yeah steam displays it in megaBYTES
DOH! my bad about that one lol


but like i said, HDD write speed is displayed as ~15megaBYTES while download speed never goes above 10.0megaBYTES in steam.
doesnt add up right?

and i did the math, i seem to be downloading at a faster rate than 10megaBYTES
ive hit speeds of 1GB/minute or even more, which is clearly in excess of 12.5megaBYTES, right?

but steam never displays more than 10

[Satoru]

The theoretical limit of your downloads is 12 MB/sec

Note HDD write speeds include everything happening at the time of the download. That is not a good indicator of your actual bandwidth usage

You should be monitoring the actual networking stack and seeing the bandwidth usage. Rather than interpolating bandwidth usage from disk usage, as they are not related

[wuddih]

you receive the download in compressed form(like a zipfile), so higher disk activity then download speed can be seen as normal as the on-the-fly extraction can and will result in bigger files.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Originally posted by saaya:

ive hit speeds of 1GB/minute or even more

i highly doubt that. must have been a glitch.

[GoldenS -k1do ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.com]

ok

[76561198308860078]

= =

[saaya]

Originally posted by Satoru:

The theoretical limit of your downloads is 12 MB/sec

Note HDD write speeds include everything happening at the time of the download. That is not a good indicator of your actual bandwidth usage

You should be monitoring the actual networking stack and seeing the bandwidth usage. Rather than interpolating bandwidth usage from disk usage, as they are not related

oh, so the disk usage displayed in steam is TOTAL disk usage, not just what im getting from steam?

thx!

[saaya]

Originally posted by wuddih:

you receive the download in compressed form(like a zipfile), so higher disk activity then download speed can be seen as normal as the on-the-fly extraction can and will result in bigger files.

ah... that makes sense... didnt know steam download files are compressed... but yeah, makes sense... thx!

but when i was on a slower connection disk writes never outperformed download speeds in steam... so on my new connection files are compressed but on my older slower connection they werent?

[saaya]

somethings definitely not right
at the beginning it shows disk speed of around 10-15MB/s but dl sped only around 7MB/s
on the graph it also shows disk writes as notably higher than DL speed.

but after a minute or so the graph changes, instantly, and network speed is suddenly displayed as being faster than disk speed.

http://img.techpowerup.org/161119/weird.png

but if you look at the numbers, disk speed has gone up to 20MB/s by then
and download speed is only 10MB/s

the most obvious bug would be that the disk speed is wrong, and is actually about the same as the download speed, and not twice as high, right?

and somehow the graph only displays the buggy inflated HDD speed at the beginning and later displays the correct HDD speed, about the same as the network speed.
but the NUMBER displayed on the left is still bugged and shows twice the actual HDD speed?

[saaya]

i downloaded a game and timed it at around 600MB/minute, so thats around 10MB/s which adds up
so the download speed displayed in steam is fine, its the HDD speed thats off

my bad!
i guess i must have timed it wrong last time when it came out to be around 1000MB/minute

math 1
saaya 0

^^

[Victor Hugo Pinto Souza]

Quem ainda estiver enfrentando esse problema é só desativar a opção "exibir taxas de download em bits/segundo". Assim, ele irá exibir a velocidade de sua conexão dividido por 8.

Por exemplo, quem tem 600 mega, vai ser dividido por 8 e ter uma taxa de download de 75Mb/s

[Steve]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.