(FIXED, SORTA) Anyone else having issues with Steam download speed going up and down, up and down?

[owl]

UPDATE 2024:

This is to help out anyone else that might be having this issue:

In my case, it was because I had a bad SATA SSD. Like, it still worked, but the speeds were throttled and it had problems. One thing you can do to check this is search for Disk Management in Windows, or search 'format hard disk' and click whatever pops up in search.

Find your drive there and see if it says it has errors (you'll see a little exclamation if it does). If it does, you can right click and 'reactivate disk' and that will fix the problem for a while.

You can also check Task Manager and go to the Performance tab, and look to see what your disk usage is like when it's installing games. If it's pinned to 100% or fluctuating etc.

If you have another SSD or HDD of any kind, try installing games on that as well and see if you have the same problem. If not, it means it's a drive-specific problem and not related to your Steam install/PC as a whole. Your best bet is ditching the messed up drive and replacing it asap.

ORIGINAL POST:

As of a couple months ago, I started having this problem. Whenever i download a game, or at least extremely often, the speed constantly goes up and down, up and down.

I don't just mean 5 mbs to 10 and fluctuating between. I mean it goes all the way up to 70 MB/s (which was my normal Steam download speed prior to this) to 0. Then sits at zero for a while, then goes back up. Then fluctuates between 60 and 10, 60 and 10, so on and so forth.

Image showing the problem: https://imgur.com/a/sn4foPh

It's a neverending cycle and nothing fixes it.

I've tried..

- turning off antivirus
- turning off firewall
- switching to many, many different download regions in steam
- closing anything else that uses network
- plugging into ethernet (ive always been plugged in directly)
- completely reinstalling steam and deleting all files except steamapps and steam.exe

The only thing that works is throttling speeds to 25 MB/s. That stabilizes it, at least it did a few times. Since I have a gigabit connection, I'd really rather not do that, as Steam downloads are one of the main reasons I bothered with that.

I only know of one other person who has had this issue, and it's one of my close friends. He just throttled (same fix) because he has a slower speed so it didn't matter. No amount of googling shows anyone else with the problem, though.

Any advice? At this point I'm just going to send a bug report and support request in to Steam.

[Guydodge]

yes i have the same problem takes 2 to 3 times longer than it use to.i thought it was due to my new internet provider as it started about the same time.i have frontier internet.

[Cheezus Crisp]

I don't see the download speeds ever dropping to 0 in the screenshot you provided. There are multiple factors that can cause this. Either your ISP is throttling your network, or (if) it hits 0 download speed but your disk is still being used, steam is just waiting for the downloaded files to be decompressed before continuing to download. Hence the speed drops.

It sounds more plausible that its just steam waiting for the decompression since you mentioned that if you throttle the speeds, it would stabilise which means that less files are being downloaded and your PC is able to keep up with decompressing and writing the files to your drive.

I suggest contacting your ISP either way to see if they're reducing your network speed when at high usage.

[owl]

Originally posted by Cheezus Crisp:

I don't see the download speeds ever dropping to 0 in the screenshot you provided. There are multiple factors that can cause this. Either your ISP is throttling your network, or (if) it hits 0 download speed but your disk is still being used, steam is just waiting for the downloaded files to be decompressed before continuing to download. Hence the speed drops.

It sounds more plausible that its just steam waiting for the decompression since you mentioned that if you throttle the speeds, it would stabilise which means that less files are being downloaded and your PC is able to keep up with decompressing and writing the files to your drive.

I suggest contacting your ISP either way to see if they're reducing your network speed when at high usage.

Not in that screenshot, no. It fluctuates quite a bit and is quite random.

I have 3 SSDs, two of which are SATA and 1 of which is a PCIe NVMe. I don't think disk speed is an issue, especially not since this just started occurring a couple months ago. I might try installing a game to my NVMe instead of my newer SATA to see if that fixes the problem.

I will try to contact my ISP and see if they're throttling anything. Thanks for the suggestion.

[owl]

Hi guys.

Just wanted to let everyone know I solved the problem on my end. On a whim, I decided to check Task Manager and see what my disk usage was at when this issue popped up. As it turns out, it's maxed out at 100% -- with an SSD.

I have 3 SSDs in total, and decided, ok, just for ♥♥♥♥♥ and giggles, let me try downloading to my PCIe/NVMe SSD.

No problems. Zero. Completely stable and my usage didn't go above 30% at MAX. My download speed skyrocketed to 80/90Mbpos and stayed consistent the entire time.

So, to anyone else with this issue, open TM and check your disk usage. I'm going to try to look into what might be causing that and see if I can fix it.

[FruityNinja]

I'm having the same problem. Normally my download speed was 30MB/s but it keeps but currently it keeps jumping all over the place. Goes from something like 3MB/s, back to 0MB/s, up to 6MB/s again and down to zero. It has never passed 11MB/s and a download that should have took me 5 minutes has not even half way at 1 hour 20 minutes. I've gone through all of the steam support fixes and nothing has helped.I have steam installed on an SSD but all my games are on a HDD (which is at 100% usage in task manager). Did anyone find a fix, this problem is happening more frequently now and it's pretty annoying.

[AlfredoSauce]

I cleared download cache and the download speed improved significantly going from 6+ days to completion to less than 3 hours. Doing so will log you out so keep your login info handy for this. super easy fix for me but can't say if it will work for everyone.

[SuperSayinSam]

If you have steam and and wait roughly 12 hours, it does a troubleshoot in the baxkground. I left my computer overnight and its completely back to normal!

[Voidolt]

Hey did you manage to fix it? Was it ISP problem or PC thing? I have this issue since i got new internet like it's so random, sometimes i had max speed and sometimes i don't have.

[FruityNinja]

Originally posted by Voidolt:

Hey did you manage to fix it? Was it ISP problem or PC thing? I have this issue since i got new internet like it's so random, sometimes i had max speed and sometimes i don't have.

For me it just kinda fixed itself after a while. However, a couple of games such as Payday 2 and Ark both have a weird way of updating where the copying to disk section takes forever. This may have been part of the problem I was having while I posted on this discussion

[🥪The Panini🥪]

i have 239.42 Mbps but it still does that. i am downloading ark.

[FruityNinja]

Originally posted by 🥪The Panini🥪:

i have 239.42 Mbps but it still does that. i am downloading ark.

Ok, so apparently this issue happens on a couple of games (Payday 2 and ARK from what I've heard). The game updates in a weird way so that all of the game files have to be re-written to the hard drive, even when the actual download file is small. Idk why it does this but it basically takes forever because the hard drive is having to write a bunch of files for a relatively small update

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Originally posted by FruityNinja:

Originally posted by 🥪The Panini🥪:

i have 239.42 Mbps but it still does that. i am downloading ark.

Ok, so apparently this issue happens on a couple of games (Payday 2 and ARK from what I've heard). The game updates in a weird way so that all of the game files have to be re-written to the hard drive, even when the actual download file is small. Idk why it does this but it basically takes forever because the hard drive is having to write a bunch of files for a relatively small update

Small patches to large files.

[pastill i din mamma]

working for me bro

[jamesglen7]

Turn off all your home network devices including printer and check your graph. Reset your router and make sure your firmware is up to date. My security shows me if someone piggy backs my network.

[Jampsa]

Originally posted by Cheezus Crisp:

I don't see the download speeds ever dropping to 0 in the screenshot you provided. There are multiple factors that can cause this. Either your ISP is throttling your network, or (if) it hits 0 download speed but your disk is still being used, steam is just waiting for the downloaded files to be decompressed before continuing to download. Hence the speed drops.

It sounds more plausible that its just steam waiting for the decompression since you mentioned that if you throttle the speeds, it would stabilise which means that less files are being downloaded and your PC is able to keep up with decompressing and writing the files to your drive.

I suggest contacting your ISP either way to see if they're reducing your network speed when at high usage.

Do you know why, when I download something to my ssd both current network and disk usage goes to 0 and then it says ">1year" and after some time it continues to download and then same again