Crappy Download Speed?

[Redbeard the Pirate]

I caved and bought GTA V through steam this afternoon with the intent to play it tonight. My download has been running at 2mbps the entire time. I'm located in Alabama and had been downloading off of the Miami server by default. I switched to the Atlanta server hoping my download would speed up, but no luck. My ISP is Brighthouse. Looking at the stats for my state and ISP, my download speed should be significantly higher. I went to speedtest.net, and was able to download at 12.7 mbps.

What gives, Steam? At this rate it will be 2.5 more hours before my download is finished and I won't even be able to play the game tonight.

[Teknohead]

Server loads are not controlled by steam ..Alabama has less data centers. More people online your isp spreads the load. Net speed declines. Try dloads at off peak hours.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Are u free to change to any available Steam download server; please try that in Steam Client > Settings > Downloads > Region. While the closest to u is usually best, when Steam Client related downloads are slow for u, another regional server may help.

And it is 11:33pm on a Monday; LOL it's not peak hours. Maybe from like 12pm - 8pm yea.

[Satoru]

Speedtest only show you the 'theoretical maximum'

Also ISPs are now notrious for basically 'gaming' speedtest.net to look super awesome by QOS and caching, while ACTUAL traffic is throttled and basically garbage.

The best you can do is try to change your download regions and see what happens. But realistically your local link is likely the source of hte slowdowns.

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

Steam is currently pushing 441.5 Gbps in North America. So if you think there's a slowdown on steam's end its probably not.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Speedtest shows speeds in Mb (Megabits), Steam shows speeds in MB (Megabytes).

It takes 8 Mb to make 1 MB.

A 12.7 Mb connection should get you a 1.5 MB download on Steam, so your 2 MB download speeds is faster then what Speedtest is showing you.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Also when u do an Online SpeedTest, u should first exit out of anything else that could be downloading in background, otherwise it will throw off your tests.

[Satoru]

Also isn't GTAV like 50GB or something obscene like that? It's pretty damn big

[Redbeard the Pirate]

Yeah, it's huge. Sales tax here is like 10%. I should have just paid the extra $6.00 and bought it in a box.

[Satoru]

Again speedtest.net test are highly rigged to look awesome never use them as a metric for real world performance.

As I said Steam is currently pushing 441.5 Gbps right now.

Yes 441.5 Gbps

If you think Steam cant push content to you at the maximum speed you'd be mistaken. Steam can push out upwards of 100mbps to users if they can support it. But it has to be supported end to end.

Download speed issues are by and large an ISP problem. Steam has enough akamai content servers to send you data faster than your hard drive can write it.

[Teknohead]

2MB is slow as hell 50 GB should dload in about 30 to 40 mins. But it all depends on provider.

[Teknohead]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Again speedtest.net test are highly rigged to look awesome never use them as a metric for real world performance.

As I said Steam is currently pushing 441.5 Gbps right now.

Yes 441.5 Gbps

If you think Steam cant push content to you at the maximum speed you'd be mistaken. Steam can push out upwards of 100mbps to users if they can support it. But it has to be supported end to end.

Download speed issues are by and large an ISP problem. Steam has enough akamai content servers to send you data faster than your hard drive can write it.

They max me out everytime.. 7.9 MBS

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Buying such a game as retail won't help anyways, as it'll still have to update after the install. And GTAV-PC Retail is 7x 8.5GB DVDs, so it takes quite a while (like an hour or so) to even install from that too.

[ttv/mk_sandwich]

I'm in Alabama as well on Mediacom and I get pretty much the exact same download speed. I think it gets as high as 2.5MB but usually stays around 2.1

[Ratsmacker69]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

Are u free to change to any available Steam download server; please try that in Steam Client > Settings > Downloads > Region. While the closest to u is usually best, when Steam Client related downloads are slow for u, another regional server may help.

And it is 11:33pm on a Monday; LOL it's not peak hours. Maybe from like 12pm - 8pm yea.

you*