Time remaning Keeps going up and down changing to a year to 2 hours to 1 hour???!!!!

[2Turnt]

What is happening??

[Teksura]

Your download rate is not stable. It fluxuates. "Time remaining" is and has always been (for everything) a rough guess based on the rate which it sees at that moment. When your ISP chokes for a bit and the rate drops to next to nothing, the "time remaining" guess assumes it will continue at that rate forever and produces a time based on that. Then it picks up and it corrects. Basically, ignore it. "Time remaining" is and always has been one of the biggest lies computers tell us.

[Da Vampire Qwayne]

Then how do you explain a situation where the time remaining section is just blank and says nothing at all?

You will probably say that means your internet lost connection...but I am posting this comment at the same moment my steam game update is experiencing this. I am also listening to music on YouTube...so there is nothing wrong with my internet connection.

I noticed that it reads: Patching on the far right side of the download...so maybe it update is freezing up while in the patching process?

I will try resetting steam to see if that fixes the issue.

[Jack Schitt]

You're downloading something is what's happening. That's how the internet works. Rates and speeds will never be the same, constant, number. It fluctuates.

[2Turnt]

Originally posted by Jack Schitt:

You're downloading something is what's happening. That's how the internet works. Rates and speeds will never be the same, constant, number. It fluctuates.

thank you ive waited 3 years for this...

[Teksura]

Originally posted by The Bogus Captain:

Then how do you explain a situation where the time remaining section is just blank and says nothing at all?

You will probably say that means your internet lost connection...but I am posting this comment at the same moment my steam game update is experiencing this. I am also listening to music on YouTube...so there is nothing wrong with my internet connection.

You're close. But your mistake is thinking of your internet connection as a single pipeline. You're assuming if you can connect to youtube correctly then you should be able to connect to everything else in the world.

The reality is that you might be connecting to YouTube just fine but that doesn't mean your connection to Steam's download servers is uninterrupted. And yes, Steam's download servers aren't the same as their community servers even though it's both Steam. For some reason, sometimes, connections are interrupted sometimes. This could be as simple as "Steam's download server you were using got hung up on a task the same way your computer does sometimes" to "Somewhere along the path from their download server to yours, your ISP broke the connection (technical error, updating stuff, maintenance, any number of reasons), and things needed to be re-routed. Downloads in general don't like being interrupted and rerouted, so even if that interruption was short, the download may hang up for longer, sometimes needing you to step in and force it to resume.

[Jack Schitt]

Originally posted by Teksura:

Originally posted by The Bogus Captain:

Then how do you explain a situation where the time remaining section is just blank and says nothing at all?

You're close. But your mistake is thinking of your internet connection as a single pipeline. You're assuming if you can connect to youtube correctly then you should be able to connect to everything else in the world.

The reality is that you might be connecting to YouTube just fine but that doesn't mean your connection to Steam's download servers is uninterrupted. And yes, Steam's download servers aren't the same as their community servers even though it's both Steam. For some reason, sometimes, connections are interrupted sometimes. This could be as simple as "Steam's download server you were using got hung up on a task the same way your computer does sometimes" to "Somewhere along the path from their download server to yours, your ISP broke the connection (technical error, updating stuff, maintenance, any number of reasons), and things needed to be re-routed. Downloads in general don't like being interrupted and rerouted, so even if that interruption was short, the download may hang up for longer, sometimes needing you to step in and force it to resume.

When the remaining section is blank it means the connection stopped for some reason. The reason these things stop can be any number or reasons and situations: Server's busy or resetting, your connection is busy or resetting.

Possible but not guaranteed solution: Try downloading at off-peak times which are between 11pm and 6am wherever you are. That's about the only thing anyone can do.