Why does downloading anything through steam suck?

[♔ BananaKing ♔]

Well I know a lot of people have this issue, the issue when you download something (game/addon/dlc/whatever) it will start to download, get up to close to your max download speed and then stop downloading for around 10-30 seconds then randomly start up again. It does this throughout the download, not even mattering how big it is. It could be a 30 kb download and it would take 10 minutes to download. This has been going on for years, I have searched up solutions and the closest thing I have found is to set a download limit and a new server location (which I have done and it worked for a while then suddenly stopped).

So my question is, Why does a multi-million dollar company have such ♥♥♥♥♥♥ download and upload speeds for their program?

[Jaunitta 🌸]

Check with your ISP
This may assist you.
If your download speeds does not compare scan your computer for spyware and check any programs using your ISP service background updates with the Taskmanager processes.
Steam Download Stats
Click any country or state to see details
https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/

[♔ BananaKing ♔]

Originally posted by Jaunitta:

Check with your ISP
This may assist you.
If your download speeds does not compare scan your computer for spyware and check any programs using your ISP service background updates with the Taskmanager processes.
Steam Download Stats
Click any country or state to see details
https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/

I actually had just reset my pc back to factory settings due to a software issue. I was trying to reinstall my games and it would do this. There couldnt of been any malware/viruses/background processes taking anything. I also have verizon fios which on that site is the fastest on average (my download speed is around 100 mb/s, same with upload).

[Jaunitta 🌸]

100 mg a sec wish I had that. Australia
Thats pretty good.
It may seem random stops to us but actualy the game doesnt stop downloading still downloads in the background, many times there will be surges like peaks and then slow down as Steam and other things use the internet for a moment.

I just delete Steam web cache and no internet pages open and dont do any internet video like youtube bascially.
Have a look in your task manager here you can see how many instances there is for Steam maybe you will see things like Ubisoft if you have those games. They all use all the cores of our cpu.
What condition our HDD is in age etc can also effect download speeds as the file data downloads it writes to the HDD or SSD.

See if anyone offers you some tips.

[Kargor]

The situation where it's "getting to close to max speed, then drops off" sounds a lot like an overload situation where either the ISP or the router can't handle the traffic.

My suggestion would be to tell Steam (the client has a setting for that, IIRC) to limit download bandwiidth to something slightly below your actual bandwidth. It's a bit difficult to juggle this for downloads so I have no idea how the Steam client does it, but it might help as it keep queues empty (or mostly empty).