Download Throttling results in constantly fluctuating download speeds

[Colonel Mustache]

Hello. Years ago, downloading on Steam was a complete hassle, because every few seconds the download would suddenly jump down to 0 bytes per second, and then have to gradually work its way back up to normal for a few seconds before dropping again. Fortunately, this hasn't been the case, on my end anyway, for a long time. Until now. The "good" news is, it only happens when throttling the download, but I am completely baffled as to how that affects it.

To clarify, if I do not throttle the download, Steam pretty consistently downloads at around 500 kb/s. If I go into the download settings and throttle it to, say, 256 kb/s, however, it goes back to its old habit of only downloading some of the time, and downloading at 0 the rest. I don't think it's a problem with the download region I'm connected to, because again, it works perfectly fine when I'm not throttling it. Only when throttling it does it decide to jump up and down between 0 and whatever I've set the limit to.

Anyone have any ideas what could be causing this?

[DarkearthBR]

I'm also with this problem and wanted to know how to fix.

[Cabusha]

Happens here too, has for years. I think it's just how they designed their throttling system. Rather than implementing some form of QOS so that it'll throttle at a consistent speed, they just have it download at max then 0, so the average meets what you throttled too. It's a crappy implementation, but know Valve/Steam, they'll never fix it.

[Satoru]

That only happens if you're patching as you will download a delta patch, then it gets applied to the game files, then moes to the next delta patching

Ify ou download a game new, and use the throttle settings, it will stay pretty much at the set limit for the entire time. If its not, then its probably somethign else on your system doing something.