Steam dropping to 0 bytes of download randomly.

[greasy breads]

Consistantly my download speed for Steam has been dropping to practically nothing for about a minute, before reviving again and downloading at a slower than average pace. Whenever I use epic games, firefox, or origin, it always is a smooth 30 mb/s or even 40. But on steam it's in the 20s, before dropping to zero and going into the 10s before dropping to 0 again.

I've tried clearing my download cache, and am wondering if there's anything I can do to fix this.

[Nx Machina]

Two processes - downloading and disk activity. Both can happen at the same time or be independent of each other. If downloading has stopped, then check disk activity.

Blue vertical lines - downloading - Green horizontal line - disk activity.

Note: Downloads are compressed so they need to unpack and place files in the install location for the game. The download folder is a seperate and the space taken is freed up after the download and install has completed.

[greasy breads]

Originally posted by Nx Machina:

Two processes - downloading and disk activity. Both can happen at the same time or be independent of each other. If downloading has stopped, then check disk activity.

Blue vertical lines - downloading - Green horizontal line - disk activity.

Note: Downloads are compressed so they need to unpack and place files in the install location for the game. The download folder is a seperate and the space taken is freed up after the download and install has completed.

My disk and network seem to work in tandum, then network drops off to zero while disk stays up. Why is this issue exclusive to Steam?

[rawWwRrr]

Originally posted by greasy breads:

My disk and network seem to work in tandum, then network drops off to zero while disk stays up.

Correct. As Nx Machina pointed out, the activity can "be independent of each other". It's not exclusive to Steam. Depending on the developer, they can issue updates as a series of patches that are downloaded and initiated one at a time. There are several ways that updates can be deployed.