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Steam can obliterate 1gbps connections
Your downloads are limited by
1) your CPU
2) your disk IO
3) your anti virus
4) your ISP
For reference at the start it climbed to 35MB/s but then for a spell hovered around 20MB/s.
I have fiber optic, so the reason is not my neighbor is taking bandwidth from the wire, and the only other device using internet right now is the TV and it is in steady state watching some YouTube video. In addition, my ISP made it super super clear they never, ever throttle your connection speed EVER.
Your SSD has a buffer, and it got full.
Once it got full, all your disk could do is write from the buffer.
Disk I/O (usage) likely shows it is very busy.
Normally when you download something, it sends it to the buffer. (which is its internal ram-like storage). Windows has this option enabled by default at least.
This allows for the advertised writing speeds.
The advertised writing speed measurements also assume you have this feature enabled.
When data is in the buffer, the SSD begins writing the data to storage immediately.
however, when the buffer is full (which is usually 8GB of memory) nothing can be written to the buffer anymore, so it needs to be emptied first, after it is emptied, it continues downloading to the buffer and seems to be writing at the usual speed.
On linux, likely you have this buffer disabled.
this means downloading and writing will be slower, but it also means there is a new max writing speed.
so it will look like a single data stream of straight writing, instead of going up and down on the graph.
...
edit: Summarized your SSD's actual write speed cannot keep up with the download speed.
If you want to test what its actual speed is, use CrystalDiskMark and disable 'write caching on the device'.
We could try to make a case that the OS has a buffer (or the steam client itself) for downloading. However, a spinning disk can easily maintain 80-160MB/s write which is far above my max theoretical download speed of 37.5MB/s. The drive is an internal SATA spinning disk and the SATA has more than enough bandwidth as well.
In addition, the buffer theory does not explain that the issue is recent where as the test machine, drivers did not change anywhere near the time of the behavior. The only thing that has changed is the Steam client.
The download pulse is also not regular either (jn time or bytes written), which also goes against the buffer theory.
As of now, the over 90GB game has now maintained high download speed for a solid 5 minutes now. When I have the pulse to zero speed the interval is seconds.
What this smells like is something like a Steam client screw up.
your downloads are limited by
1) your cpu
2) your disk IO
3) your anti-virus
4) your isp
Windows itself says at the option:
Windows, at this option directly tells the user reading it, that it can control if the buffer on the device gets used with this checkmark.
... here's the documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-hardware/drivers/storage/querying-for-the-write-cache-property
That would have been handy to know up front.
If you leave important stuff like that out and then react the way you did, your thread will look like nothing but bait designed to prove other people wrong on your superior knowledge.
It depends on the buffer, the size, and what else the disk is doing. Also considering you just stated in your last post that it is a HDD, we're talking about a much smaller buffer then. A HDD also has another limit. It cannot do Read and Write at the same time. It's either one of the other, and there will be a lot of random 4k seeking, which occupies time spend that it could be writing.
Actually some older model HDDs don't even have a dram buffer internally, but I assume yours is newer.
...
generally if it was you'd see haywire going on on every forum about it, much like with the user stats server issues a while ago.
Although HDDs are used less since they became more expensive due to less competition in designing them, such effects would still be noticable even on SSDs, so...
I expect more community uproar if it was 'just the steam client'.
I think it is exactly this for the following reasons.
Theories about buffer exhaustion do NOT make sense, unless some wacky Windows update did this, but then the same issue would manifest in other download situations such as GOG or Epic, and it does not. Indeed, given that a spinning HDD can easily maintain 80-160MB/s and the connection is 37.5MB/s, the buffer theory is quite unlikely. Theory about a server issue also does not fully explain it because of the Linux side.
However, it has gotten loads better which smells like a combination of the Steam client and interaction with the server side.
How the Steam client downloads is actually... really dumb. It just keeps making connections until the download speed does not get better.. there is a discussion on its silliness elsewhere. It might have changed since that discussion (I doubt this though) and it might even be different on MS-Windows and Linux. I don't feel like pulling out Wireshark and walking the packets to be honest.