(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.

[winterhold888]

I also have the speed issue going up and down I have Verizon gigabyte my pc will start the download at like 900 mbps then just drop down to 0 go up to 4 or 5 hundred and drop to 0 or just stop download all together I don't get it I've cleaned the steam cache I've reinstalled steam I've disabled all antivirals I even have msi download manager and it shows me nothing else is using bandwidth I fully updated my entire system including my bios I'm the only one on my Web no other devices I've changed regions there all the same way the fastest one is the us Boston region with were I live is the closest to me I'm out of ideas I tried everything on this page and alot of other things I'm a pc gamer since 2015 if anyone has any other ideas please let me know there no excuse for this on the pc AKa monster I run

[winterhold888]

This issue only exists on steam non of my other apps act up not origin or blizzard or Microsoft or ea games ect I can go on all day

[CptnDownsyndrom]

Same here it spikes from 200mbs to 300mbs to 30 or 0

[maki]

apparently it was my disk. dont know if its cuz it was almost full or some other problem. i simply switched to another disk and it runs at 90 like usual.

[owl]

Oprindeligt skrevet af the monster in his closet:

apparently it was my disk. dont know if its cuz it was almost full or some other problem. i simply switched to another disk and it runs at 90 like usual.

yep, it was the same issue for me. SSD was bad. Drive still works overall, but runs at a fraction of the speed and has errors, need to replace it at some point.

If anyone else has this issue, and youve ruled out other causes, go to disk management and check to see if your drive is working properly

[Sir_Cum_Size=D <3]

for me the problem was almost full ssd , after i cleared some stuff , it went to full speed and no dips

[Shaggin'Wagon]

Oprindeligt skrevet af owl:

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

This is caused by the storage device in your computer (or the CPU in your computer or both) being too slow to handle decompressing steam games while they "download". There is nothing to "Fix" other than to acquire faster hardware.

[owl]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Shaggin'Wagon:

Oprindeligt skrevet af owl:

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

This is caused by the storage device in your computer (or the CPU in your computer or both) being too slow to handle decompressing steam games while they "download". There is nothing to "Fix" other than to acquire faster hardware.

I know, I discovered this years ago. Actually in my case, it turns out that the SSD drive isn't too slow, but rather just borked outright (apparently that particular brand/model has issues). I have to 'reactivate' it in the Format Disks interface to get it to work at its normal speeds, but the issue always comes back. I just stopped putting anything important on it and use it for random games I don't care about losing.

[Grant]

hey guys, so im not very tech savy, but i noticed when i download stuff the spped varies alot, like going up to 700mbps which is kinda normal cause im using ethernet, but then going basically to zero, and just going up and down and up and down, usually making a 20 minute download take upwards of 45 minutes or more,

[Rin]

A near full SSD will tank in perf as will an oveheating one and the same goes for dying/overheating HDDs and even more so if they are heavily fragmented or using SMR instead of CMR.

If you store games on an HDD in this day and age and is cheap then the likely case of you having a SMR HDD is 100%.

Some games also can come compressed or need to be fully rewritten with even tiny patches as is the case with UE3/UE4/UE5 games.

[Чеченька]

Hey, hi everyone

I faced the same problem. I have never written such texts before because I always found a solution to my question, but here the situation is different
In general, I once watched a video on YouTube, where a guy said that after bringing the Internet into the house, you should stabilize the router traffic by limiting its speed to a little less than what was allocated to you. I won't go into details, but it worked
I did the same thing now and it helped me

While I was writing this text I was watching what was happening on the screen and this is what I got:

https://imgur.com/a/RrsBjHp

[Shaggin'Wagon]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Чеченье:

Hey, hi everyone

I faced the same problem. I have never written such texts before because I always found a solution to my question, but here the situation is different
In general, I once watched a video on YouTube, where a guy said that after bringing the Internet into the house, you should stabilize the router traffic by limiting its speed to a little less than what was allocated to you. I won't go into details, but it worked
I did the same thing now and it helped me

While I was writing this text I was watching what was happening on the screen and this is what I got:

https://imgur.com/a/RrsBjHp

None of that has anything to do with this problem. It's only the storage system in your computer, the speed of your computer's processor, and how fast your system's storage drive is. If your computer is fast enough and it's storage is fast enough you should never see the download speed in Steam drop down for even a second.

[JulianFlaco85]

i was having this issue also, then i closed opera gx and it fixed. So maby opera gx is the problem

[PocketYoda]

Sounds like malware..

[BaldDemon]

Oprindeligt skrevet af 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.

did you ever figure out why it happened since im struggling with that heavly and its super annoying since it takes me half a decade to download an 80gb game