Steam downloading horrifically slow

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Useless Information Mar 14, 2020 @ 4:31pm

Hello everyone, rn my internet seems to be doing fine, but I noticed last night that steam, for whatever reason, has been downloading my games at VERY slow speeds, much slower than normal, to the point where this morning, a game was downloading at only a few hundred BYTES per second. Not kilobytes, not megabytes, just b y t e s.

I have already tried changing download locations multiple times, clearing download cache, restarting my computer, turning off firewall, reinstalling steam, made sure cpu and disk usage is low, changing download limit, and adding the steam folder to exclusions.

I have absolutely NO clue what to do, and I've been looking everywhere for solutions, which none have seemed to work so far. Any help would be greatly appreciated

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Showing 1-11 of 11 comments

Ilja Mar 14, 2020 @ 5:41pm

Have you tried clearing the Steam Downloads cache?

Steam > Settings > Downloads.

Note that process requires you to log back in to client.

Jacob Mar 19, 2020 @ 12:23pm

I'm having the same issue right now! have you found any fix for that?
note that I've done all the troubleshooting that you mentioned already!

guy gamer Mar 19, 2020 @ 12:43pm

Steam servers are way overloaded right now. Nothing you can do about it.

It won't even let me buy any games.

Last edited by guy gamer; Mar 19, 2020 @ 12:43pm

󠀡󠀡󠀡⁧⁧the.jester Mar 19, 2020 @ 12:53pm

Also factor in that the internet infrastructure in your area could be overloaded as well.

Jacob Mar 19, 2020 @ 12:56pm

Originally posted by the.jester:
Also factor in that the internet infrastructure in your area could be overloaded as well.

Perhaps it's steam servers, right, but absolutely not my internet at all, I've just download the new Nvidia driver in less than one minute, while steam download speed is barely 100KB/s

Useless Information Mar 19, 2020 @ 1:08pm

Hey guys, I've recently discovered that this issue seems to be something thats not entirely exclusive to steam, as I was trying to download a 5 mb file in chrome a few days ago and the ETA was over an hour. However, steam seems to be getting hit the hardest for me, but as of typing this, the problem seems to have fixed itself, at least for now? Its very possible that the problem will start rearing its ugly head at any moment, as this problem seems to happen at random. A day or two ago, the internet was downloading at its normal speed, then suddenly it PLUMMETED down to 1-8 kbp/s for at least an hour, then went back to normal. Sometimes the speeds will plummet for only a few short minutes, and other times it can last the whole day.

If you go to the steam subreddit, you'll see a pinned forum called "monthly community support thread." At the very top of the post there should be a link to this guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1082209554

I've tried almost everything in this guide with none of it working, but if someone in the future comes across this thread who's suffering with similar issues, perhaps it might help you more than it did for me! I still personally dont know what the hell is going on with my issue, but I guess I'll just wait and see if I find anything. If I do find something that helped me, I'll let y'all know!

guy gamer Mar 19, 2020 @ 1:22pm

There's absolutely nothing you can do.

The internet is busier than it's EVER been. Everything will be slow..

Last edited by guy gamer; Mar 19, 2020 @ 1:22pm

󠀡󠀡󠀡⁧⁧the.jester Mar 19, 2020 @ 1:32pm

You could try changing your download region. Steam does give a huge number of regions to choose from - try regions from areas where people would be less likely to be downloading at that time (ie. when it's nighttime and they are asleep.)

Useless Information Mar 19, 2020 @ 1:34pm

Originally posted by guy gamer:
There's absolutely nothing you can do.

The internet is busier than it's EVER been. Everything will be slow..

Yeah I considered that too, since everyone is being quarantined.

Originally posted by the.jester:
You could try changing your download region. Steam does give a huge number of regions to choose from - try regions from areas where people would be less likely to be downloading at that time (ie. when it's nighttime and they are asleep.)

I gave a few both in america and outside america a try, and none of them seemed to make much of a difference ):