no bandwidth limiting, slow downloading

[drummer_james]

Hi all,

I have recently upgraded my internet service to 500mbps. I have a wired internet connection and when running a speed test through Ookla, consistently get over 500mbps download (3ms ping).

However when downloading games for install via steam, I get between 8 and 60. watching the graph, it goes in spikes and the network and SSD activity then trails off to zero before getting another spike 10 to 15 seconds later.

downloading anything else other than steam is rapid...not sure if there is anything I have set up wrong for steam? There is no limitations under the settings tab?

Cheers
J

[Lithurge]

Steam is probably set to MB/s - 500Mbps = 62MB/s.

Check you haven't got write caching set for your SSD, I believe that can cause issues like speed drops. For me Steam maxes out my connection installing to my SSD with no drops.

[drummer_james]

Thanks,

I have switched off cache writing and it seems smoother around 90mb/s without any tail off. I don't think Steam is set to MB/s as it shows a peak of 517.2mb/s.

At least it is more stable at the moment, thank you.
J

[crunchyfrog]

Also, bear in mind that it isn't internet speed that governs Steam downloads a lot of the time.

Steam works a little differently to many other places. When it downloads games it downloads them compressed and encrypted. The upshot of this is that it unpacks and unencrypts on the fly.

And this causes your computer to do more work. If you check the downloads graph on the downloads page you'll likely see it download a bit, then stop as it writes stuff to your hard drive before starting again. This is normal.

So what giverns your download speed is internet, CPU, hard drive, I/O, RAM and more. Any weak point in that and that's what'll limit your performance.

You can check this by bringing up Task Manager while you're downloading and it'll report which bit is getting hit the hardest.

Also when you download Valve recommend the hard drive you're using has no more than about 90% used. As it needs to cache data and do all the unpacking, it needs workspace, plenty of it.

If you are using more than that 90% expect speeds to drop too.