My Steam won't download games as fast as my internet can

[X3N0]

My Steam downloads games at around 50mbps and jitters a lot (quits downloading and starts downloading again at random) and I know it's not my internet as I've done multiple speed tests on multiple websites and they all come down to around 700mbps download and 500mbps upload, it's been like this since I've gotten my laptop (October 11th) I've followed every instruction on help websites and nothing works, can somebody please help me.

[Ettanin]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1082209554

It's down to your:
* Storage device
* CPU
* Anti-virus or other kernel-level drivers
* ISP

Pick one (or multiple).

[laisbeltran]

I'm with the same problem. I spent most of my night trying to download a game, gave up and went to sleep. This morning i was able to download but I'm almost 6 hours trying to verify the game. All that trouble since updating to windows eleven

[Supafly]

Steam downloads in compressed chunks, once a chunk is down it gets decompressed and installed. If the CPU and/or drive is at or near 100% the DL will slow and may even stop until the decompress and install is complete.

Open Task manager and see what CPU and the Drives usage % is at when this happens

[crunchyfrog]

It's sale time. You should expect this.

For the duration of the sale AND about two weeks afterwards, things will be VERY congested, so you need to learn to hop regions for download.

The thing to remember is that downloading is NOTHING like online gaming. Online gaming requires decent two way connection, downliading does not. So the point here is that all you need is somewhere anywhere in the world that has least congestion. They do not need to be close.

So go to Google, and look up timezones of the globe. Find anywhere that is currently about 2 to 4 am and pick any of those. You might need to tweak it a bit to find the best, but you're sure to.

[Scarlizz]

Turn the Client Beta off in settings. I had also slow download speed and after I turned off the beta I had my full speed back.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Originally posted by Scarlizz:

Turn the Client Beta off in settings. I had also slow download speed and after I turned off the beta I had my full speed back.

Nothing between the beta and stable branch affects download speeds.

[Teksura]

Okay. I've already identified part of your problem just from the way you wrote this post.

The first thing you want to do is look at your speeds again and pay attention to the capitalization. You're conflating two different units and treating them as equal when they are not.

The numbers your ISP and all speed test websites will give you are in Mbs, which is how many million Bits per second are being transferred. Megabits per second.

The numbers Steam gives you is in MBs. That's how many million Bytes per second are being downloaded. Megabytes per second.

A Byte consists of 8 bits.


To convert between MBs and Mbs, multiply/divide your MBs/Mbs by 8. So, your Steam Download speed is equal to 400 Mbs. And your Speed test is equal to 87.5 MBs.



You're prolly wondering why there are two different units here. The answer, quite frankly, has a lot to do with marketing. Mbs gives a bigger number which can be advertised and it sounds more impressive even if it isn't actually bigger. If your ISP offered 90 MBs instead of 700 Mbs, most people would be taking the 700 Mbs thinking it was faster because it's a bigger number when, in actuality, it's the slower speed. One ISP actually tried this as an experiment, offering a special promo deal where they offered a faster speed for a cheaper cost, but they gave the speed in MBs. The deal flopped as very few people took them up on the offer, instead gravitating to the slower speeds offered at higher prices right next to it because the numbers were bigger.

But when dealing with actual file transfers, especially large downloads, Mbs isn't an especially useful number because we don't measure file size in bits. We measure file sizes in Bytes, hence the use of MBs; Megabytes per second.

So, your next question is likely "Then why am I only getting just under 60% of my download speed?"

Well, because the Steam Sale is on and a lot of other people are downloading their new games. That's a good start for why. Many other factors can throttle your speed, including limitations on your WiFi connection (though this would also show up in a speed test), the speed in which your computer can actually write the data on the disk (My downloads actually get throttled because I save all my games onto an external drive which can only read/write so fast), or any upstream issues such as heavy demand on Steam's download servers from something like the biggest sale event of the year.