bad download speed

[Abbe]

I have a good computer with decently good internet, previously I have had download speeds that exceed 40 mb/s regularly but in the past months the download speed has started to be very unstable and jumps from 0 to 40 but mostly around 15 mb/s. In other clients the download speed is normal so it seems to only be an issue on steam. Any help?

[Schranzi]

Change the node point and select a region that has little traffic

https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/

[crunchyfrog]

In addition to region changing as above (and DO NOT change to anywhere near you - it isn't the same as online gaming as ping isn't really relevant. Choose anywhere around the world).

There's other reasons, because Steam works differently to other services. All games are compressed and encrypted.

This means that it's not your net speed that governs downloads, but your RAM, CPU, hard drive, I/O and more.

What you can do is monitor the downloads page to see what's going on with your net and your hard drive. Also open Windows Task Manager and check your RAM, CPU et al to see if any of those are being hit hard. If they are, there's your bottleneck.

Also, space.

Valve recommend you don't go over about 90% used on your install drive(s). And ALWAYS allow up to THREE times the total file size you're trying to download as it needs to unpack and sort all the data and needs space for this.

If you go over these thresholds, that's a guaranteed way to get poor speed as your PC is desperately trying to eke out space to write stuff to.