Steam Unpacking Issue

[Trimack]

What is going on with this garbage download/updating. It's completely unacceptable that steam is taking 30 minutes to download a 56 gig file and then it takes over 8 hours (I finally just went to sleep so who know how long it really took) to unpack the rest of the 14 gig of data. I have been even avoiding updating games because they take for ever to finish even small files. The only reason I can think they would do something so asinine is to save them costs on bandwidth at my expense of waiting for their garbage to unpack. And there are people with SSD's complaining about this too so that and the deletion of the depot folder isn't a solution (nor should it have to be)

After spending literally thousands of dollars with Steam I'm finally about to start buying games on other platforms because if this is the direction they are going I want no part in it.

[Cathulhu]

Then maybe you should investigate on what keeps Steam from processing the data properly. It does takes a few minutes at most for me. Even when it is a bit larger.

[Trimack]

Did you have an ideas on how to do that or did you just want to tell me you're not experiencing the issue that myself and apparently many other people are as well. With no suggestions for solutions on any of the threads I've found. I mean really? You wasted my time and your time with that comment. Thanks!

[crunchyfrog]

Actually they are right.

The thing is Steam works a little differently to other platforms because games are downloaded both encrypted and compressed. This means that when they download you need to allow up to THREEE times the total file size so it can do all it's file sorting work.

Also because of this, it ain't your net speed that limits this, it's actually a combination of your net connection, hard drives, CPU, RAM, I/O and so on.

So a common way of getting the issue you're having is to not have enough space on your target drive as well. You should never go over about 90% usage on your install drive, and also remembering that "up tot three times" thing means it's easy to forget.

For example, if you have a 1TB drive, and you've used 800GB, you're fine because you have 80% used. That leaves you 100GB left to play with.

But if you then go to download a 50GB game you likely won't have enough because you would need to allow up to 150GB taking you way over the 90%.

And when you go over this you will likely get slowdown like you're experiencing, downloads going to another drive, or it just stop and start weirdly.

Also, to check if there is any part of your PC bottlenecking you can both monitor the graph on the downloads page as it shows how both hard drive connection et al are going. Couple that with Windows Task Manager and you should see if something's gettnig hit hard.

[Trimack]

Thanks for all the advice! I'll try all those things out and comment what the results are. Appreciate your time. Have a good day!

[Trimack]

Also something to note is that even though I wasn't installing it on the drive my OS is installed on, freeing up some more space on that helped improve the unpacking issue as well. I'm assuming because it does unpacking and encryption in a temp folder on that drive. Just a guess on that though.

The most important thing is to have the 3x space on the drive you are installing to. Restarting was needed also, after making more space on the drive.

[ABV- Zayko.Paps]

lol

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by Trimack:

Also something to note is that even though I wasn't installing it on the drive my OS is installed on, freeing up some more space on that helped improve the unpacking issue as well. I'm assuming because it does unpacking and encryption in a temp folder on that drive. Just a guess on that though.

The most important thing is to have the 3x space on the drive you are installing to. Restarting was needed also, after making more space on the drive.

Excellent new, and thanks for letting us know (as this can help others in future too).

Yeah, I'm notquite sure exactly how it works, but you're right in that as much space as you can give it does indeed improve things.