Steam game patches/downloads taking forever

[Sweet C]

Portal Knights recently had a 22.8 mb update that I needed to install. When I did, the download was stuck at preallocating and unpacking for over 30 minutes. I decided screw it and deleted and reinstalled the game again and surprisingly that process was much quicker compared to installing the small update.


This has been happening to me a lot lately. When I installed Guns of Icarus Alliance a few weeks ago it was taking forever to download. It downloaded at full speed for a few seconds then it stopped for a really long time before downloading another little bit of the game. What I did to fix that was to change my download region to a different one. Sadly this method did not work for me today.


What gives? Is it Steam that's acting up? Is my hard drive starting to fail? Crystal Disk Info doesn't show anything wrong with my hard drive, and it's only 6% fragmented. I read that's not a high percentage. My internet is working as it should.

[crunchyfrog]

Bad 💀 Motha の投稿を引用：

Meety の投稿を引用：

I might be having the same issue too. Updated Steam last night then decided to download some games today and its crawling to a low 3 mb/s. Before this update I was getting at least 25 mb/s speeds.

I also ran Speedtest and noticed that my ping and speeds are completely abnormal when I am downloading on Steam. When I pause any downloads on Steam, ping and download speeds return to normal.

You can't have a speed test be "normal" when something like Steam is using most of bandwidth for that systems LAN/WIFI

Exactly, speed tests make it VERY clear on their pages that you should not be doing ANYTHING when using them.

[mcelhannan]

im having the same issue , downloaded a 20 mb update for everspace which instantly downloaded but the disk write speed which is an SSD was estimating a year to install.
It completed in an hour however but still cant figure out why, its not an isolated incident

[あなたは鍬です]

csgo just said 80 days and finished the 95mb update in 4hours

[Scarecrow]

I found a very silly, but working, work around. When the patch or update download is greater than two hours, I delete all local game files, folders, subfolders and the like. Then I download the whole game as if it were a new purchase. It took me only 23 minutes to download GTA V, while the update was scheduled to take 32.6 hours. I gave up on downloading the update/patch about 2 hours in, and started over. The game downloaded "new" is already patched.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Scarecrow の投稿を引用：

I found a very silly, but working, work around. When the patch or update download is greater than two hours, I delete all local game files, folders, subfolders and the like. Then I download the whole game as if it were a new purchase. It took me only 23 minutes to download GTA V, while the update was scheduled to take 32.6 hours. I gave up on downloading the update/patch about 2 hours in, and started over. The game downloaded "new" is already patched.

This only "works" for those with very fast ISP speed plan; like 250Mbps or higher.

Not sure why yours would even take long to download + patch if your ISP is that fast unless maybe it was a temporary server download issue. It also helps to use around 2x SSDs minimum as well. OS + Steam Client on one SSD while Steam Game Library is on another.

[crunchyfrog]

Bad 💀 Motha の投稿を引用：

Scarecrow の投稿を引用：

I found a very silly, but working, work around. When the patch or update download is greater than two hours, I delete all local game files, folders, subfolders and the like. Then I download the whole game as if it were a new purchase. It took me only 23 minutes to download GTA V, while the update was scheduled to take 32.6 hours. I gave up on downloading the update/patch about 2 hours in, and started over. The game downloaded "new" is already patched.

This only "works" for those with very fast ISP speed plan; like 250Mbps or higher.

Not sure why yours would even take long to download + patch if your ISP is that fast unless maybe it was a temporary server download issue. It also helps to use around 2x SSDs minimum as well. OS + Steam Client on one SSD while Steam Game Library is on another.

Nope, it's quite likely actually.

The issue as I've described above. The limiting factor on Steam downloads are NOT your connection speed, but most often your hard drive and CPU, simply because of the nature of how Steam downloads work.

Downloading an all-in-one raw download of a game just will be unpacked and decrypted then written to the final destination, whereas updates will be doing all that PLUS having to patch in detail compared to just writing.

So yeah, if your hard drive is a bit slow or dying, or your CPU isn't up to the task, then that's highly likely.

[Bishopton]

Hello everyone, I see there is no clear answer to this issue but this is what worked for me. I have an WD Blue SN550 NVMe. I downloaded WD's software and disabled Windows write caching. It helped out a lot. It went from hours to minutes. Hopefully this helps you.

[MissBanjo]

Some of these explanations are just hogwash. Let me tell you why. My husband and I have identical computers we bought at the same time in July 2021. We're both on a wired connection to our router, WiFi is turned off. I just downloaded the 2.1GB Icarus patch, full completion in 10 minutes. He has now been downloading for 25 minutes and it's started verifying. At least it's not 9 hours but it's still pretty ridiculous that this happens.

[crunchyfrog]

misbanjo の投稿を引用：

Some of these explanations are just hogwash. Let me tell you why. My husband and I have identical computers we bought at the same time in July 2021. We're both on a wired connection to our router, WiFi is turned off. I just downloaded the 2.1GB Icarus patch, full completion in 10 minutes. He has now been downloading for 25 minutes and it's started verifying. At least it's not 9 hours but it's still pretty ridiculous that this happens.

Sure, some WILL be hogweash for YOUR situation.

Because there is NO one solution that fits everyone. The problem is that with ANY online based service there can be MANY, MANY things that cause issues.

If I had to guess as you have the same connection and so on, it will likely be some software on one of your PCs causing this.

Try this - start that PC in safe mode with networking. Run Steam only, and do the download. If it fixes it, then it absolutely IS some software on that PC causing it.

What that is is sadly for you to work out, but you should start with antivirus and firewalls, or security software.

[ZelosTheLittle]

I've recently upgraded to a new pc and noticed that updates now take way longer than it did before on my old pc. I have a feel at least for me that it has to do with the read/write speed of the m.2 the company i brought from used. before updates took less than 10 mins now up to a hour

[Iceira]

ZelosTheLittle の投稿を引用：

I've recently upgraded to a new pc and noticed that updates now take way longer than it did before on my old pc. I have a feel at least for me that it has to do with the read/write speed of the m.2 the company i brought from used. before updates took less than 10 mins now up to a hour

make sure you dont have cache on disk ( the write behind cache, same as if you cant keep up with inc data you just make things worse like over floding yourself, you might need Raid or better disk to handle inc data, see if disk is busy that 100% a hint in i cant keep up. we can say you have slow disk even then you think you are fast, maybe if you knew Raid or Raid0 ( technicaly its just 2 disk write as one, thgat will beat any single disk, rest is seen as ISP or network issue or worse down this road like isp throttle bandwide to proof what is going on, as you said it old pc seem to be batter, now oyu need to figure out why is that.

and i bet you know the get a friend laptop or spare pc, but you already point at it, with spare pc.

do know steam use CPU disk I/O while installing, so becare full with OC and other smart ass things that might not be so smart then system has to deliver to its disk ( this inclue in old days Antivirus scan while install and other temporary files system ( temp files ) and virtual ram, all effect DL, most know this from the past. then we unzip things, and watchout for supercompressed files they are seen as heavy unpacking, even seen some past pc with low cpu core sit and cry over the slow process. ( its a complex steam ways, but build on past modem files to be as small as possible, you might laugh here but with steam million of files and storage of it, then 1 bit here and there has cost most forget and care about.

and be happy game devs do compress files, of you wont be able to have many games as raw data, so they do pack the files even in apps. ( most know this but there is always someone that dont know this. )

then you get past 1000+ games or more then you will see storage of all them games in a diffrent light just like steam, be as samll as possible all the time.

gl with it whatever it is you struggle with, ( dont forget old advice update netcard driver and all the other tips in check up on connections )

even change steam DL zone can effect this.

[nobin.c]

This same thing happened to me. The previous comments are correct. Steam likes to, without saying so, copy your game over to another steam library, apply the update there, then copy it back. For me with a 350MB internet connection it didn't make sense why one update would take OVER 5 hours with terrible disk usage. It seems it was copying games from my fast nvme onto my much slower HDD I use just for storage, hence why every game it updated would take way longer than it should. Make sure you have no other steam libraries (or that they're all fast), you can't control how a game packs it's files but you can control where steam sneakily goes off to copy the game.

[Scarecrow]

crunchyfrog の投稿を引用：

Bad 💀 Motha の投稿を引用：

This only "works" for those with very fast ISP speed plan; like 250Mbps or higher.

Not sure why yours would even take long to download + patch if your ISP is that fast unless maybe it was a temporary server download issue. It also helps to use around 2x SSDs minimum as well. OS + Steam Client on one SSD while Steam Game Library is on another.

Nope, it's quite likely actually.

The issue as I've described above. The limiting factor on Steam downloads are NOT your connection speed, but most often your hard drive and CPU, simply because of the nature of how Steam downloads work.

Downloading an all-in-one raw download of a game just will be unpacked and decrypted then written to the final destination, whereas updates will be doing all that PLUS having to patch in detail compared to just writing.

So yeah, if your hard drive is a bit slow or dying, or your CPU isn't up to the task, then that's highly likely.

It's certainly not because I have a dying hard drive, or CPU. I am, in fact, running on 2x SSDs, as described above. Steam patching of games is slow because it's slowed down at the other end, not on my end.

[emp456]

nobin.c の投稿を引用：

This same thing happened to me. The previous comments are correct. Steam likes to, without saying so, copy your game over to another steam library, apply the update there, then copy it back. For me with a 350MB internet connection it didn't make sense why one update would take OVER 5 hours with terrible disk usage. It seems it was copying games from my fast nvme onto my much slower HDD I use just for storage, hence why every game it updated would take way longer than it should. Make sure you have no other steam libraries (or that they're all fast), you can't control how a game packs it's files but you can control where steam sneakily goes off to copy the game.

This happened to me right now, and was seraching for the forums in case a recent update is doing weird things because never happened to me before.

The worst is that i have a 70gb game installed on a ssd (with almost 120gb free) but Steam wants to update on my HDD and the result is from waiting a few minutes at max to almost 1 hour :P Btw, Steam needed to write just 38gb (vs 120gb free...there's 0 sense using a different drive instead of that where the game is installed)

I tried deleting all the files, logging off to start again but at the end i had to download the whole 70gb which was faster than trying to update the game.

It's really frustrating and stupid because it partially destroys the purpose of having the game installed on a ssd as part of the thing is to avoid very long patching times. As i still use the HDD (much bigger than the ssd) to install some smaller games or those that don't need a very fast drive to decently run, my unique option is to delete and download the whole thing again with each update or to sacrifice my HDD library. Infuriating :S

[crunchyfrog]

Scarecrow の投稿を引用：

crunchyfrog の投稿を引用：

Nope, it's quite likely actually.

The issue as I've described above. The limiting factor on Steam downloads are NOT your connection speed, but most often your hard drive and CPU, simply because of the nature of how Steam downloads work.

Downloading an all-in-one raw download of a game just will be unpacked and decrypted then written to the final destination, whereas updates will be doing all that PLUS having to patch in detail compared to just writing.

So yeah, if your hard drive is a bit slow or dying, or your CPU isn't up to the task, then that's highly likely.

It's certainly not because I have a dying hard drive, or CPU. I am, in fact, running on 2x SSDs, as described above. Steam patching of games is slow because it's slowed down at the other end, not on my end.

Then please explain how it can be slowed down at their end and yet it just chooses YOU to do this to?

Where's your empirical data to prove your tests of your equipment?