Steam download is choppy

[FieryTorrent]

So, im downloading an update for a game, and it'll start to download then just stop and the download window says:
Current: 0kb/s
Peak: blah blah blah

then about 10-15 seconds later it resumes, or just doesn't resume at all.
I just got a new router and it was working amazingly so I don't know if it's a steam issue or my computer or what. But it's a little annoying and not really too troubling but if I can fix it I definitely would

[CorvusHood33]

Unregistered Sex Defender님이 먼저 게시:

I know this is late but I think I've solved it. I was having the same issue where my drive always had to catch up and the download would keep dropping on and off. I checked my internet because I thought there might have been an issue with my connection but it came back to 230 mbps (even though I'm not paying anywhere near that amount). Because steam would download huge chunks of the game and basically swamp my drive, I set my bandwith limit to 25 mbps (the highest available setting) and the download went back to normal.

I’ve been dealing with a choppy download for 9 WHOLE hours! It’s sped it up and kept it consistent. But I’ve lost the spurts. Now it won’t go above 1mbs 🙄

[tech]

yep steam is the only platform that does this for me

[Mibbeh]

Biggus Dickus님이 먼저 게시:

Unregistered Sex Defender님이 먼저 게시:

I know this is late but I think I've solved it. I was having the same issue where my drive always had to catch up and the download would keep dropping on and off. I checked my internet because I thought there might have been an issue with my connection but it came back to 230 mbps (even though I'm not paying anywhere near that amount). Because steam would download huge chunks of the game and basically swamp my drive, I set my bandwith limit to 25 mbps (the highest available setting) and the download went back to normal.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this fixed my problem. I've had it for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ YEARS

Actually ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ same

[Elucidator]

The thread was made 2015; at that time the cause could have been the Intel Puma 6 chipset on their modem / router.

In the modern age (2023) there are a number of possible causes, including indeed the actual writing to the SSD being slow.
Usually the system writes to the SSD's DRAM, which is fast. After the buffer is filled, download slows down. The buffer needs to be emptied before more can be downloaded and written to the SSD.
Depending on how this is done, downloads can indeed go to a full stop, since then an entire fill needs to be written before it is cleared and replaced inside the DRAM of the ssd.
Other drives may be able to do this in segments, which causes very odd looking graphs.

A couple of other invisible things that can slow downloads down are:
Intel Gen 12 CPU's thread count bug. The CPU only using E-Cores (at low power) instead of all cores, slows down the download. And often also affects the rest of the system

Someearlier Western Digital Black Nvme SSDs have a bug where they slow down writing because they do it for whatever reason more than once. (disable write caching on the device to confirm this). (it maybe present on other SSDs, I am guessing a driver or firmware fix will be issued at some point.)

It's a good idea to test everything and search the web at the time you're experiencing such a bug as such. Perhaps others have found similar problems already.
Also try not to follow guides that do not get updated with the modern day. If they are too old, they likely cause more problems than they fix.

Keep an eye on the dates as such.

[Tim]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.