Slow Patch after Download on Steam (Slow Patching Potential Fix)

[Kibilburk]

I just wanted to share this because I searched on Google and in Steam and couldn't find an easy answer. I thought that maybe by posting this it would help others.

I downloaded a 3gb patch for Remnant II and it said that patching was going to take nearly 5 hours! I had a similar issue with a patch for Elden Ring. For Elden ring I had it on a Samsung Evo 970 NVMe and it was near its limit so I think it was swapping between that and my HDD. So, I removed a bunch of old AMD GPU drivers (because I guess they don't auto-delete), and I think that helped.

But, what was going on with Remnant 2? I put it on my HDD directly and it had plenty of room, so it shouldn't be swapping between drives... and even a HDD shouldn't take 5 hours. So, I open up Task Manager and what do I find? Amazon Photos is taking up a bunch of my HDD usage! Well, screw photo backups, I want to game NOW! So, I tell Amazon Photos to stop backing up, still see some usage, and kill it from Task Manager. VOILA! The patch update goes from 5 hours to 20-30 minutes. The read/write went from alternating between kb/s and mb/s rates to being a solid 70-something mb/s. It was just an issue with Amazon Photos and Steam fighting over usage... and it made both INCREDIBLY INEFFICIENT. So, now my game will be patched quickly and I'll restart the photo back-ups. Everyone is happy and there's a lot less wasted time!

So, again, maybe this has been posted a 1000 times before, but I found it frustrating and wanted to shout into the void in case someone found it helpful.

And in a lazy attempt for some SEO, here is a bunch of gibberish to hopefully match search engine results:

Why does steam take so long to patch games?
Why is my patch so slow?
Slow patching patch slow slow patch trusty ol' Patches! slow patch hour long patch patching
Why is game taking so long to patch? how I can speed up my patching?
steam slow patch bad harddrive? etc. etc. etc.

[Mr_Bump]

Interesting. I was having the same problem on my ROG Ally, but I didn't think this would fix it - I opened up task manager and nothing else was using the CPU apart from Playnite at like 7%. Can't hurt I figure, so I closed Playnite and boom, the patch time went from 40 minutes to 5! Must be something to do with how Steam utilises the APU for patching doesn't play well with other processes with the Z1 chip....? As for why it's not working for you - if that's a desktop you might want to upgrade your CPU haha!!