Why is steam download speed capped at ~30MB/s?

[CBlue]

Some time ago, don't remember when exactly, instead of 1Gbps throughput I get around 250MBps to 300Mbps, ie 1/3...1/4 of my usual speed.
Or in MB/s notation: I used to download steam stuff at around 110MB/s (aka ~1 Gbps), now I'm stuck at 30-40MB/s.
I'm not sure when exactly this happened, but I noticed that in my own country and 3 surrounding ones no matter which download server of these I choose I remain at 30 MB/s. I tried out another countrty that was somewhat farther away and actually got 40MB/s there, so that's a little improvement.
But I want my 110MB/s back. Steam, what tf are you doing?

PS: To exclude connection issues of my network itself I speedtested my line and I'm getting around 990Mbps, so the LAN/cable connections seem fine, as usual.

[Jerry]

It seems possible, that the new beta version of family sharing messes up the download limits in some way. Are you participating in this mode?

[Satoru]

Steam can obliterate your bandwidth

Your downloads are limited by

1) your cpu
2) your disk IO
3) your antivirus
4) your isp

Pick one

[CBlue]

Originally posted by Jerry:

It seems possible, that the new beta version of family sharing messes up the download limits in some way. Are you participating in this mode?

No. I didn't change anything. Steam suddenly started to behave this way. Other downloads outside of Steam are working fine as always.

[CBlue]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Steam can obliterate your bandwidth

Your downloads are limited by

1) your cpu
2) your disk IO
3) your antivirus
4) your isp

Pick one

None of these apply, except if my ISP has a hidden, new "let's limit steam downloads" policy.
However, it would seem inconsistent that I get better bandwidth from a different steam server that is even farther away then.

[CBlue]

Good news:
Just now I am updating a larger game again, and this time I'm at around 74MB/s.
Not yet perfectly back to where it used to be, but still much better than the 30MB/s I experienced lately.

I speculate that steam servers might have experienced overloading in the past few weeks, cannot think of anything else making sense. Or my ISP is really not telling me something, but that seems a bit unlikely, as it would be easy to notice and they would have to pay me back.

[Satoru]

Steam can obliterate 1gbps

Steam can do 400MBs on a trans atlantic link from Europe to North America

Steam is not 'limited' in bandwidth

[Hannibal]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Steam can obliterate 1gbps

Steam can do 400MBs on a trans atlantic link from Europe to North America

Steam is not 'limited' in bandwidth

When I see it Ill believe it. When Epic Ubisoft, Origin, can provide 120 mb/s and Steam offers at best 10 mb/s...................then yeah Im not buying it.

[Runkel]

Originally posted by Hannibal:

Originally posted by Satoru:

Steam can obliterate 1gbps

Steam can do 400MBs on a trans atlantic link from Europe to North America

Steam is not 'limited' in bandwidth

When I see it Ill believe it. When Epic Ubisoft, Origin, can provide 120 mb/s and Steam offers at best 10 mb/s...................then yeah Im not buying it.

YouTube™ Video: 600MB/s Steam download over 10Gbps Sonic fiber link 

Views: 60,313

Even faster than my first video. This took 90 secs from start to finish!!! This was not using any Steam caching server locally; this is direct from the public internet.

[Snapjak]

https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/
Find your area. Steam routinely puts out terabytes of data every minute.

[Badstormer]

I can personally verify that Steam doesn't cap download speeds to any extent I can reach even above gigabit speeds. Odds are you're writing to a drive that can't write as fast as your download speeds can reach, especially if you're downloading highly compressed games.

[Iceira]

If pc user dont know windows resourcer's manager, and learn workload, or disk/cpu/network workload at 100%, this is seen as find your bottleneck, we all did this, and yes there many other option a user can do or pc build mistake, depend who you talk with.

if you have a casual pc, then huge chance this is what you get then you dont understand steam super compressed files.

And before you get a rage fit, keep in mind we dont care if you have world best pc or worst.
we also help ppl with toaster, and we tell them it is a outdate pc or lag of GPU power to run things, its better to be told then not know. ( ask any gamer here then things lag or something do not do as it should )

gl with OP,


Nothing prevent you from use a spare pc to test its not own isp into steam issue, and its my own pc with a problem. ( and that's why multi pc test can be seen as a good idea )


ps.
ISP also have ISP partners partner, so test line into own ISP dont mean you get max dl from rest of the world.


I could also say what do we need brodband to if next ISP partner cant keep up.
and why this can be complicate to explan to ppl. ( and why have a good dialog to own ISP is a most )


Do not get caught in QoS or ip traffic management or own lan multi pc issue that share broadband . aka ip radio or other device that drain line, i do not say you have this see it as what if you have.

ps.
there is a reason why some is network experts, and they always get to the root of the problem, then you have traffic from A to Z, you start a process of faulty finding who cause this, and we dont care who it is, we go for the ball

You have 3 options here, You end of the line ( to wallplug ), your ISP, or steam in other end.
its actual that simple, even then its not.