Why doesn't Steam show the latency to its download servers?

[Reaper]

This has been bugging me lately. When selecting a download region, we should be able to view the current ping to whichever server we are selecting. Distance doesn't always equal speed and there's so many servers in the list it would take forever to go through them all manually

[Phantom]

What's the precedent of asking for this?

"Latency" here wouldn't matter (mostly) because content servers can be affected by congestion.

Closest ones (with low latency) could be stuffed and have worse performance.

Meanwhile some servers in another continent could be perfectly fine at that moment.

[Reaper]

Originally posted by Robin3sk:

What's the precedent of asking for this?

"Latency" here wouldn't matter (mostly) because content servers can be affected by congestion.

Closest ones (with low latency) could be stuffed and have worse performance.

Meanwhile some servers in another continent could be perfectly fine at that moment.

Just downloaded a 40GB game and wanted to see if I could speed it up. Steamstat tells you the server load for csgo. There's also an app (long time ago cant remember the name) that used to tell you the ping for them and allow you to force connections to specific csgo servers. I wish there was a way steam would show the same data for download regions as well

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by FeaR_TH3_Reap3R:

This has been bugging me lately. When selecting a download region, we should be able to view the current ping to whichever server we are selecting. Distance doesn't always equal speed and there's so many servers in the list it would take forever to go through them all manually

Because oping is not a factor in Downloads. Ping is the round trip time for yor system to send a signal and for a response signal to get back.

In a game. this is important. since that more or less mirrors the time between you pressing a key and seeing the resuklt on your screen..

Downloads don;t work like that. There's little to no back and forth. Just an inititiation and a steady treanm of asynchornous packets.

[Reaper]

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Originally posted by FeaR_TH3_Reap3R:

This has been bugging me lately. When selecting a download region, we should be able to view the current ping to whichever server we are selecting. Distance doesn't always equal speed and there's so many servers in the list it would take forever to go through them all manually

Because oping is not a factor in Downloads. Ping is the round trip time for yor system to send a signal and for a response signal to get back.

In a game. this is important. since that more or less mirrors the time between you pressing a key and seeing the resuklt on your screen..

Downloads don;t work like that. There's little to no back and forth. Just an inititiation and a steady treanm of asynchornous packets.

However, a ping will give you and idea of the hops between servers and how far away it is on the route. Lower ping means less routing, means it should be faster download speeds.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Routing changes quite a bit depending upon various factors.

I'll tell you that I have better luck with downloads using servers on the other side of the world most of the time.

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by FeaR_TH3_Reap3R:

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Because oping is not a factor in Downloads. Ping is the round trip time for yor system to send a signal and for a response signal to get back.

In a game. this is important. since that more or less mirrors the time between you pressing a key and seeing the resuklt on your screen..

Downloads don;t work like that. There's little to no back and forth. Just an inititiation and a steady treanm of asynchornous packets.

However, a ping will give you and idea of the hops between servers and how far away it is on the route. Lower ping means less routing, means it should be faster download speeds.

NMot necessarily.
Lower ping just means a faster round trip taking the 'llong way' through fast lightly trafficked servers can yield a shorter ping than a single, or relatively fewer hops through congested servers.

Think of it this way. SOmetimes. It's faster to take the long empty road than the short road prone to gridlock.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by FeaR_TH3_Reap3R:

This has been bugging me lately. When selecting a download region, we should be able to view the current ping to whichever server we are selecting. Distance doesn't always equal speed and there's so many servers in the list it would take forever to go through them all manually

Downloads have like nothing to do with latency. You could literally have 5 minute latency to a site that has 1 Petabyte/second of bandwidth

Latency and bandwidth are 2 entirely different things. And showing the 'ping' to a download server gives you ilterally no useful information

I would prefer a high latency high bandwidth server, vs a low latency low bandwidth server

[Overseer]

You don't need a ping because data is buffered and its integrity is checked. Latency is important for gaming, not downloads or streams.
Steam will just open plenty of ports and request as many packages as it can. How quickly a single package arrives is irrelevant.

[nullable]

Originally posted by FeaR_TH3_Reap3R:

However, a ping will give you and idea of the hops between servers and how far away it is on the route. Lower ping means less routing, means it should be faster download speeds.

I don't think it works like that. I don't think you can provide a quality resource that agrees with you. And I would be surprised if you came to this conclusion based on any research or reading that you've done. I'd be willing to bet money this idea is based on intuition and it sounds good to you so you believe it's probably got some merit however insignificant.

If ping had any value for the context you're on about I would think after 30 years most download services and managers would display ping to the user. At least the good ones would... right? But they don't. Why do you think that is? Malice? Ignorance? Indifference?

[Supafly]

Latency is time to get to and from NOT how much data it can transport at a given time thus not important for things like streaming an downloading.

When gaming you want it as fast as possible. Downloading and streaming it doesn't really matter because once the stream/download starts it's streaming/downloading. That's what buffering is for.

If it takes 30ms to start the DL or 1,000ms to start the DL the DL has started. At which point the round trip no longer matters in terms of time. Provided connection is steady you should get the same sort of speed throughout the download.

So the latency only matters at the start. Even if you got a slightly lower latency you really won't notice a higher/lower latency once it start downloading. Delays can happen between the servers and a user just as easily on a low latency connection as it could on a high latency connection.