Steam downloads: Starts stops starts stop etc etc

[Billy Fiddler]

Recently my steam downloads have been starting and stopping every five seconds, and something predicted to download in 40 minutes, actually takes 2 hours to download, I have tried a lot of methods such clearing my steam download cache, changing my server region, throttling my download speed etc, annnnnnnd nothing works, any help would be appreciated.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

That's just how some games update.

What is a particular game you are seeing where Steam does updates in this way?

Slow drives and/or internet can contribute to this behavior as well.

[Billy Fiddler]

after first finding the issue I tested it on multiple games, tried downloading Shadow Of Mordor, Payday 2, Elder Scrolls Skyrim, and even smaller games, like Nidhogg, these all had the same noticeable effects, i get an average of 8-10 megabyte a second download speed, and have not had a problem with this starting stopping business until recently.

[kaMMakaZZi9]

I have this issue too. With a 100 megabit connection (peaks at 14.8 MB/s on steam downloads). Also HDD is not even 1 month old yet - Seagate Barracuda 2TB HDD 7200 at SATA III 6G/s speeds.

Most of the time my download graph is a smooth tall line showing the max speeds or anywhere from 14 to 14.8 MB/s but I see it start to drop all the way down to KB/s and then the graph starts to look like a series of different sized skyscrapers....with empty pits between them when it completely goes to 0 speeds.

Wtf is this? My internet and HDD are fine.

[Billy Fiddler]

i can only recommend that you throttle your download speeds, if you throttle it to 14mb/s then it may fix it, all i can say mate sorry :\

[Big Boom Boom]

Depends, when it unpacking the download it would show 0 mb/s because it's unpacking on your hard drive. This could take hours depending on the game and minutes instead if you have SSD. Since SSD is pretty much standard nowadays more and more games do this. I think Total War Warhammer does this, download 500mb patch, unpacking 30gb. People with HDD cry.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Its called "my drives are slow"
Yes lets say the actual update is 500MB but that is just new data to files that originally take up MANY Gigabytes; Steam must take the time to allocate the full space the update needs, this means downloading not just the new data update, but then taking your original game files this data will update, copy those original files to a temp folder, where it then has to open, inject new data, repack the file, when it's all down your game files get updated with these new ones which are now repacked with the updated patched data. Since many games will have enormous files which must be unpacked in order to mess with the smaller files inside. Those are the kinds of games that will also benefit from your faster drives, like SSD.

[Retrowaver]

Had the same issue, the problem was that my new laptop was set to have the hard drive spin down after 600 seconds and that was making the mysterious stops on all my downloads not just on Steam. The speed is now constant, no more fluctuations or sudden stops.

[Fredrik Reinfeldt]

hello willy

[Billy Fiddler]

Throttling my downloads helped surprisingly, and I opened the ports for steam on my router and now my downloads are all good good good

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Originally posted by VeniceisnumberWAEHHN:

Had the same issue, the problem was that my new laptop was set to have the hard drive spin down after 600 seconds and that was making the mysterious stops on all my downloads not just on Steam. The speed is now constant, no more fluctuations or sudden stops.

HDD Timeout (in Windows Power Options)
does not affect the Primary / OS Drive, its for Secondary drives.
That only occurs if there is a separate Sleep mode set to apply.

[Gabrbot180]

Originally posted by red:

Throttling my downloads helped surprisingly, and I opened the ports for steam on my router and now my downloads are all good good good

What ports did you forward?

[Dwagger]

I had this problem.

I just paused the download. Closed and exited steam, then once i restarted it and signed in the download seemed to continue as normal.

Hope this works for at least some of you guys :)

[gunmawfia]

This is extremely late but im on mac and it is going to 2.2 KB/s then it stops for 2 minutes then it does 2.2KB/s and it stops then goes and so on and so on

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Originally posted by gunmawfia:

This is extremely late but im on mac and it is going to 2.2 KB/s then it stops for 2 minutes then it does 2.2KB/s and it stops then goes and so on and so on

Try a different download server.
Steam Client > Settings > Downloads

[sheepy]

Originally posted by red:

i can only recommend that you throttle your download speeds, if you throttle it to 14mb/s then it may fix it, all i can say mate sorry :\

thank you so much! i throttled it to 25mb/s and it works perfectly