Steam throttling DL's

[Dura_Ace]

Last 6 years ive been getting 9.3 Mbps

Just this last year all of a sudden it is at 7.7 no matter what i do. It is not BT. It is steam that is throttling me.

Why?

[my new friend]

What is BT?

[Satoru]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1082209554

steam can obliterate 1gbps connections

steam does not throttle downloads

[Dura_Ace]

Originally posted by my new friend:

What is BT?

British Telecom

[nullable]

Originally posted by Dura_Ace:

Last 6 years ive been getting 9.3 Mbps

Just this last year all of a sudden it is at 7.7 no matter what i do. It is not BT. It is steam that is throttling me.

Why?

What have you done to rule out every other cause and confirmed it's Steam?

Kinda seems like you've made a convenient assumption, and aren't aware or have dismissed the higher performance lots of other people get. Which of course requires more assumptions where Valve is throttling some subset of users... why would they be doing that? Why wouldn't telecoms or other variables be responsible. It's not as if internet providers haven't or don't throttle users...

You might want to look a little deeper, and look to mitigate some of your confirmation biases.

[[☭]-Soviet-Triumph-]

Valve outsources servers and oftentimes they're in a bad state, try changing your download region, i get 7x more speed in LA servers despite physical distance between server and me of 6,000 miles.

[Your Mom's Oshi]

Originally posted by Dura_Ace:

It is steam that is throttling me.

Actual proof? I'm glad you were smart enough to call your isp first but them saying they aren't throttling you doesn't prove that steam is. There's more variables than that.

[Carlos100]

Originally posted by Dura_Ace:

Last 6 years ive been getting 9.3 Mbps

Just this last year all of a sudden it is at 7.7 no matter what i do. It is not BT. It is steam that is throttling me.

Why?

Bt are the worse people regarding internet
They hide the fact they throttle

[my new friend]

Originally posted by Carlos100:

Bt are the worse people regarding internet
They hide the fact they throttle

Sound legit.
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/1736588252372525765/
https://community.bt.com/t5/BT-Fibre-broadband/BT-Throttling-Game-Downloads/td-p/2171636

[Runkel]

Originally posted by Dura_Ace:

Last 6 years ive been getting 9.3 Mbps

Just this last year all of a sudden it is at 7.7 no matter what i do. It is not BT. It is steam that is throttling me.

Why?

It's on your end. I'm always downloading with 36 MB/sec

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by Dura_Ace:

Originally posted by my new friend:

What is BT?

British Telecom

Sorry but BT DO actually throttle, and they won't tell you either partly because well that's obviously not something they like to say, and partly becaue their staff are poorly trained and probably don't know about it. You can see tons of evidence of their antivs on watchdog sites like Which? or on ispreview.co.uk

Anywho Steam DO NOT throttle speeds at all. Some people assert this from time to time but if it were the case these forums wuold be PACKED with people complaining and that ain't happening.

What does happen is that your internet speeds IS NOT the limitng factor here. It's actually your hard drive, your RAM, CPU, I/O etc. They ALL affect the speed.

You can see thsi by both looking at the graph on the downloads page, and in your TASK manager when downloading. If you see any of those parts of your PC getting hig usage, there's your problem.

On top of this many users don't understand how steam works and it does beahve differently. All downloads are encrypted AND compressed. So when you donlowda it needs to do all the file unpacking and swapping on the fly.

For this reason you need to allow up to THREE TIMES the total file size for download. On top of this STeam does not like you to go over 90% usage on your install drive.

So for example, if you have a 1TB drive, you can't go over 90% or 900GB usage. Furthermore, if you currently have 800GB used then you have 100GB to play with but if you then try to download an 80GB game you won't have enough space, because you need to allow up to THREE times that size, which will put you WAY Over 90%.

So any of those are likely why your speed has dipped, or BT have simply throttled you or there's some problem on your line.

Good luck getting that fixed with BT as they're notirously bad at fixing their infrastructure.

[Fake]

I don't know what to tell you. I'm paying for 20MB/s* and I'm getting 20MB/s from Steam.


*my internet package says 150Mbps but if you convert it to Bytes, its only 18.75MB/s.

Not sure where the other 10Mbsp is coming from.

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by Fake:

I don't know what to tell you. I'm paying for 20MB/s* and I'm getting 20MB/s from Steam.


*my internet package says 150Mbps but if you convert it to Bytes, its only 18.75MB/s.

Not sure where the other 10Mbsp is coming from.

Not sure what you mean there. I get that it's working as it should but the difference is largely either misreporting on your ISPs end and you actually get more than quoted (I do myself - my ISP says up to 50MBps and I get 55-65 all the time), or it's just loss through your PCs architecture.

[Your Mom's Oshi]

I've had 2 separate ISPs throttle my steam downloads but they were honest about it when I confronted them. I just had to ask them to close my account and they would offer to suspend the throttling for a year to stop me from switching. Of course this only works if you live in a city that is not monopolized by a single internet provider.

[Mad Scientist]

Valve does not throttle downloads through Steam, only other parties can do that.

Steam is in MB/s
Internet speed measurements are Mbps.

They are not the same thing.