Small download, huge/slow patching stage

[MarkussLV]

Can't really find any info anywhere regarding this, I noticed ever since the new download section layout change that downloading updates now for games and applying them is taking forever. Like the update is 80mb large but for whatever reason it has to go through entirety of game files (e.g. 48GB) and it takes forever. Never noticed this before the update. Can anyone explain?

[Pranav]

Yep, I have been facing this issue as well. First I thought it was an issue on my end, but I asked few of my friends and they have been facing the same issue too since the update.

[aiusepsi]

I saw some new-to-me behaviour which included a long patching stage yesterday, judging by the logs, it seems to happen if there's not enough free storage on your disk for Steam to do the usual process. Steam usually uses some temporary space during the update, this new behaviour seems to be able to get away with using much less temporary space, but at the cost of not downloading at all while it's going on. I'm not exactly sure what it's doing differently, though.

Also possibly a factor, before the download UI update the UI didn't actually show the size of the file I/O work it was doing, just the size of the download, so patching stuff was still being done, it was just a bit less visible than it is now.

[Cathulhu]

Download behavior hasn't changed since the introduction of SteamPipe almost 10 years ago.
The recent change to the download page only changed how information is displayed.
It's way more transparent now what is happening.

So, no. Downloads did not get slower, or patching. Some games just have very inefficient file structures.

[rawWwRrr]

Case in point: PC Building Simulator released a huge update. It was 300MBish download. It patched 20GB of files. It took longer than most updates I've had. Other things that have updated today from my library have been quicker. It all depends on the game and how the developer is updating it.

Patching has been around far longer than the download UI update.

[Satoru]

Literally nothing has changed, people seem to love blamign the "new UI" for things that have literally not changed in over a decade

Your downloads and patching speeds are limited by

1) your cpu
2) your disk IO
3) your anti-virus killing disk IO

[DLM]

Originally posted by Cathulhu:

Download behavior hasn't changed since the introduction of SteamPipe almost 10 years ago.
The recent change to the download page only changed how information is displayed.
It's way more transparent now what is happening.

So, no. Downloads did not get slower, or patching. Some games just have very inefficient file structures.

That's the main culprit. Most recent games (I can think of Cyberpunk right off the bat) consider that with the size of our HDD/SSD having large files is OK. Except that patching 10 files that are 4GB each is less efficient than a hundred of files that are 500MB. If you only need to update a few files, on one side you can end updating 2 dozens of GB and on the other side maybe less than 1GB total.

[aiusepsi]

Originally posted by Cathulhu:

Download behavior hasn't changed since the introduction of SteamPipe almost 10 years ago.

You say that, but several things definitely have changed. For one, they made some changes to improve how delta patching works to get better efficiency; I'm not 100% on the details, but it's different to what they initially described as "delta patching" when they first released Steampipe. The first release achieved it by breaking a game down into blocks, and reusing unchanged blocks from old version in the new version. They seem to have improved that by getting Steam to be able to transmute blocks in the new version.

And there does seem to be some new behaviour recently, I saw this in the Steam content_log.txt earlier:

[2021-12-09 13:55:07] AppID 1240440 switching to update single file mode ( 26149 MB needed, 11240 MB available)

I've never seen this "switching to update single file mode" bit before, and I do tend to keep an eye on this sort of stuff. In this case, I looked at the logs specifically because Steam did something weird of spending a long time patching before it attempted to download anything. I'd not seen that exact thing before either.

EDIT: Did some additional research, the "single file mode" was mentioned by Valve to a dev on Total War by at latest April 2019: https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/be88f9/comment/el3qxxw/

So, not new, exactly. I guess I've not been trying to install updates on a nearly full drive before. Anyways: it does show that Steam's download behaviour is very much not immutable over time.

[rawWwRrr]

Of course they're going to make updates to improve efficiencies over time. But the method of patching is of itself is not new.

[MarkussLV]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Literally nothing has changed, people seem to love blamign the "new UI" for things that have literally not changed in over a decade

Your downloads and patching speeds are limited by

1) your cpu
2) your disk IO
3) your anti-virus killing disk IO

I've got Ryzen 5900x 12-core processor so cpu should be fine, the HDD definitely will slow it down as maximum speed I saw it perform was about 40mb/s or something, still. I don't have an anti virus software :) They tend to interfere with so many multiplayer games etc I stopped using it, I depend on Defender to sort of take care of most things and I'm staying away from anything dodgy out there.

Still I'm not blaming Steam or the new UI in why I posted this discussion at first, all I wanted to know if there are anyone else who's noticed this. When we had old UI it seemed to download update however big it was and patch it if not instantly then much quicker than now. I remember it having ''patching'' phase but it definitely didn't take too long.

E.G.

Game called Icarus had a little update of 60mb, but it was patching for over half an hour over 48GB, makes little sense this unless this is some sort of Forced ''reverify'' game command? Not sure.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who responded, I normally just suck it up and don't dwelve into asking the crowd on opinions since they are mostly quite colourful ^^

[MidknightRider]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Literally nothing has changed, people seem to love blamign the "new UI" for things that have literally not changed in over a decade

Your downloads and patching speeds are limited by

1) your cpu
2) your disk IO
3) your anti-virus killing disk IO

This is not entirely accurate. Ive not changed my hardware in 3 years and i dont run AV on my gaming rig. The only thing that has changed, is the steam platform.

And this is patching vs. downloading has been occuring on more and more games in the past week. This is most certainly a change done on Valve's side in order to attempt to provide a more efficient download process, but ultimately increases the patch time for any game signficantly.