Steam download starts fast, then slow down to 0

[Cavalorn]

From last night I'm trying to download 2 games, but Steam is doing something it never did before. It starts downloading fast (but always slower than normal), then slows down progressively to 0. Then, after a couple of minutes, it restarts, doing the same process over and over. It never did this to me before. Is this happening only to me? Is this a temporary Steam problem?

Thanks.

[Brady]

Mine does the exact same thing.. it'll be downloading at 5Mb/s then progressively slows down to 1kb/s until it stops...
It's been doing this for a year or so now :(

[Brickman409]

This is an issue I have always had with Steam and never really seen a solution to. I've notice that this happens far more often on my laptop then on my desktop, which makes me wonder if it is more of a disk speed or CPU speed issue than anything else.

Just to gather some research on this hypothesis, what CPU do you all have and what is the make and model of the drive you are trying to install your games to? (if you don't know the exact make and model, just let me know if it is an SSD or HDD, PCIE/NVME or SATA, what's the size, cache size, RPM, etc.)

[Brickman409]

Ok, I think I figured out the problem and I found a solution!

Basically what is happening is that your download speed is being bottle-necked by your disk write speed. I have come to this conclusion because in the downloads stats, it shows both download speed as well as disk write speed. When this was happening to me, my disk write was much slower than the download itself. You can also see in the graph that the green line indicating the disk activity still keeps going after the blue bars representing download stop. The green line trails off and falls down to about zero before the download bars rise up again. This is akin to taking notes in class with a prof that talks to fast, so you have to ask him to stop for a moment to catch up on your notes.

So, what's the solution? Network throttling! (never thought I would say that like its a good thing). Steam has a nifty tool to throttle your download speed to whatever you'd like. My internet speed was reaching over 200 mbps while my disk speed was only averaging at around 10 MB/s. So I throttled my download speed to 80 mbps (which is equal to 10 MB/s) and my download speed became slower, but much more stable! It no longer dropped down to zero, and held that 80 mbps speed very steadily for quite a few minutes. I then slowly crept up the throttling to see if I could speed it up while keeping it stable, and I found that 150 mbps was a pretty good balance of speed and stability for my PC.

To access network throttling, go to Steam -> Settings -> Downloads, then check "limit my bandwidth to:" and enter the speed you would like (keep in mind it expects a value in kbps, so 10 MB/s would be 80 mbps or 80,000 kbps). Play around with it though and see what works best for you.

[northcord]

I have a 2500 dollar computer, and the best internet money can buy. lol. my write speed should be faster than the download speed yet, they both slowly drop to 0 every time. i have to constantly stop and start again and again,

[Pekmez Pita]

Originally posted by northcord:

I have a 2500 dollar computer, and the best internet money can buy. lol. my write speed should be faster than the download speed yet, they both slowly drop to 0 every time. i have to constantly stop and start again and again,

Yeah. I don't know what's going on but i have been having the same issue the past few days.

They have also been releasing multiple updates to the client since March 15. One "hot fix" after another.

[Elucidator]

Money doesn't buy you knowledge.

Microsoft Windows has a build in internal network throttling feature obstruction.
Open up the registery with 'regedit.exe'. (You can find it in c:\windows\system32)
and then go to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows NT > CurrentVersion > Multimedia > SystemProfile"
There you can find a key called NetworkThrottlingIndex
by default its value will be 'a'. Change it to 'ffffffff' to disable it.

Considering you have an expensive PC, I assume you also have an NVMe SSD? Likely one that is directly connected to PCI Express 4.0
In that case, its likely that microsoft windows is causing some usage bugs for whatever reason.

People commented that disabling the 'Write Caching on the Device' feature improves the drive's performance.

Try testing your download speed after doing these two things.

There are a number of other tweaks you can do to improve your device's efficience and performance; such as disabling sysmain, etc. I recommend looking them up online.

....

Despite its intention, usually Windows isn't as plug and play as people may hope. (Oddly enough some linux distros lately are more often better at that than Windows; but it really depends on what the end user (you) want from your machine.)



Edit: I assume you have no clue where to find the Write Caching on the Device option.
Right click the start menu, select device manager.
then find your SSD. (It should be between storage devices)
Double click this, and go to the policies tab.

[chillendill0n]

Originally posted by Elucidator:

Money doesn't buy you knowledge.

Microsoft Windows has a build in internal network throttling feature obstruction.
Open up the registery with 'regedit.exe'. (You can find it in c:\windows\system32)
and then go to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows NT > CurrentVersion > Multimedia > SystemProfile"
There you can find a key called NetworkThrottlingIndex
by default its value will be 'a'. Change it to 'ffffffff' to disable it.

Considering you have an expensive PC, I assume you also have an NVMe SSD? Likely one that is directly connected to PCI Express 4.0
In that case, its likely that microsoft windows is causing some usage bugs for whatever reason.

People commented that disabling the 'Write Caching on the Device' feature improves the drive's performance.

Try testing your download speed after doing these two things.

There are a number of other tweaks you can do to improve your device's efficience and performance; such as disabling sysmain, etc. I recommend looking them up online.

....

Despite its intention, usually Windows isn't as plug and play as people may hope. (Oddly enough some linux distros lately are more often better at that than Windows; but it really depends on what the end user (you) want from your machine.)



Edit: I assume you have no clue where to find the Write Caching on the Device option.
Right click the start menu, select device manager.
then find your SSD. (It should be between storage devices)
Double click this, and go to the policies tab.

dude thank you so much. I’ve spent so much time googling ♥♥♥♥ and trying the common “fixes” that are often advertised and never found any sort of success. Finally came across this and it seems to have worked! :)

[Gigatron]

Originally posted by Elucidator:

Money doesn't buy you knowledge.

Microsoft Windows has a build in internal network throttling feature obstruction.
Open up the registery with 'regedit.exe'. (You can find it in c:\windows\system32)
and then go to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows NT > CurrentVersion > Multimedia > SystemProfile"
There you can find a key called NetworkThrottlingIndex
by default its value will be 'a'. Change it to 'ffffffff' to disable it.

Considering you have an expensive PC, I assume you also have an NVMe SSD? Likely one that is directly connected to PCI Express 4.0
In that case, its likely that microsoft windows is causing some usage bugs for whatever reason.

People commented that disabling the 'Write Caching on the Device' feature improves the drive's performance.

Try testing your download speed after doing these two things.

There are a number of other tweaks you can do to improve your device's efficience and performance; such as disabling sysmain, etc. I recommend looking them up online.

....

Despite its intention, usually Windows isn't as plug and play as people may hope. (Oddly enough some linux distros lately are more often better at that than Windows; but it really depends on what the end user (you) want from your machine.)



Edit: I assume you have no clue where to find the Write Caching on the Device option.
Right click the start menu, select device manager.
then find your SSD. (It should be between storage devices)
Double click this, and go to the policies tab.

I've had this problem for over a year now and didn't know how to solve it at all, thank you very much!