Most (but not all) games only download at about half the speed of my internet connection. How to fix?

[Onno]

So I have a 750Mbps internet connection. I can download stuff at full rate outside of steam. Most Steam game downloads are somehow not being downloaded as fast though. Bar some exceptions (X-plane 11, for example) most games download at roughly half the speed of the internet connection (320-350Mbps)
How can I improve these download speeds?

[Yujah]

By more carefully balancing your game-drive write-speed and number and frequency of your CPU cores.

That is, you can first of all of course never download faster than you are able to write (well, not for long anyway) but assuming that you've higher write-speeds than the 320-350Mbps or so you are reporting, Steam downloads are due to the compression and chunking quite CPU intensive and you may run into 100% CPU load if the drive itself can in fact write fast enough to keep it busy. You'd check a process monitor while downloading to see if this is the issue.

[Onno]

I have a hard time beleving it is a system bottleneck. I have a fairly powerful system with a 5800X3D and PCI-e 4.0 x4 SSD (Corsair MP600XT)

[Ettanin]

Originally posted by Onno:

I have a hard time beleving it is a system bottleneck. I have a fairly powerful system with a 5800X3D and PCI-e 4.0 x4 SSD (Corsair MP600XT)

then the other likely factors are kernel level subsystems such as device drivers, firewall software, antivirus software or boot-time anti-cheats.

[Yujah]

I've heard Steam downloads referred to as a good system benchmark tool. Can still for now only suggest to check a process monitor while downloading to look at CPU and/or disk load.

[Onno]

Originally posted by Ettanin:

Originally posted by Onno:

I have a hard time beleving it is a system bottleneck. I have a fairly powerful system with a 5800X3D and PCI-e 4.0 x4 SSD (Corsair MP600XT)

then the other likely factors are kernel level subsystems such as device drivers, firewalls, antivirus software or boot-time anti-cheats.

And just for steam? Because I get good speeds outside of Steam. Also, how would that be the case with most, but not all games on Steam then? X-plane 11 downloads at full speed. Halo MCC won't.

[Onno]

Originally posted by Yujah:

I've heard Steam downloads referred to as a good system benchmark tool. Can still for now only suggest to check a process monitor while downloading to look at CPU and/or disk load.

Not exceeding 25% on any of the important system KPIs. I have 10GbE on my LAN, so it's not the network either.

[Ettanin]

depends on how well the serverside chunk compression is. Don't worry about download speed that much, the write speed in the end is what matters.

Patching can be much slower than installing though.

[Ettanin]

Originally posted by Onno:

Originally posted by Yujah:

I've heard Steam downloads referred to as a good system benchmark tool. Can still for now only suggest to check a process monitor while downloading to look at CPU and/or disk load.

Not exceeding 25% on any of the important system KPIs. I have 10GbE on my LAN, so it's not the network either.

what's the cpu utilization in % and how many logic threads does your CPU have?

[Yujah]

An 5800X3D is 8C/16T -- and if it doesn't go above 25% then I guess I'll withdraw; no idea; I tend to see much higher CPU utilization myself during Steam downloads.

[Onno]

Originally posted by Ettanin:

depends on how well the serverside chunk compression is. Don't worry about download speed that much, the write speed in the end is what matters.

I can get a lot more speed when writing a temp file in /temp from /dev/random
I'm on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, so anti-cheat or anti-virus are not the issue here.

Originally posted by Ettanin:

Originally posted by Onno:

Not exceeding 25% on any of the important system KPIs. I have 10GbE on my LAN, so it's not the network either.

what's the cpu utilization in % and how many logic threads does your CPU have?

At first there is a boost to ~45%-50%, but X-plane can download at full line speed with a ~25% utilisation while downloading at full line speed. Single threads might peak to ~40%-50% from time to time, but that is about it. It is not the system!

[Yujah]

Approximately 500G seems too much to have this be the effect at play here but I'll still leave this here: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/corsair-mp600-core-xt-2-tb/6.html. FWIW.

[Onno]

Originally posted by Yujah:

Approximately 500G seems too much to have this be the effect at play here but I'll still leave this here: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/corsair-mp600-core-xt-2-tb/6.htm. FWIW.l

Thanks, that is a potential bottleneck for the larger games. I have the 4TB version. But in any case, 100MB/s still is more than the ~72MB/s that my line should be able to supply. And I get this a lot sooner than when the cache should be running out.

[Ettanin]

Originally posted by Yujah:

Approximately 500G seems too much to have this be the effect at play here but I'll still leave this here: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/corsair-mp600-core-xt-2-tb/6.html. FWIW.

Good find. This might likely be the issue here. The SSD has only 500 GB fast cells while the remainder is slow.

If you need an alternative SSD, i have good experiences with both the Seagate Firecuda 520 and 530.

[Yujah]

Yeah, it didn't seem it would explain enough. Sorry, especially if you're not on Windows no further suggestions (on Windows, disabling write caching on the drive would've been worth a shot).

[Onno]

Originally posted by Ettanin:

Originally posted by Yujah:

Approximately 500G seems too much to have this be the effect at play here but I'll still leave this here: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/corsair-mp600-core-xt-2-tb/6.html. FWIW.

Good find. This might likely be the issue here.

If you need an alternative SSD, i have good experiences with both the Seagate Firecuda 520 and 530.

So how would that explain a bottleneck before the cache limit kicks in?