Steam Download rate stuck at 0 bytes/s. But still seems to be download just ridiculously slow

[zweitdivisionar]

So I was dumb and bought Total War: Rome 2. They've been releasing an update every couple of days on Steam. Instead of being polite and asking if you would like to download the update, they take the liberty of falsely thinking they know what you want and proceed to download it automatically.

The major, most annoying problem I've faced is the download rate is stuck at 0 bytes/s. Even though when I downloaded the actual game from steam it maintained at about 2.2 mb/s the entire time. The updates appear to be downloading but just very, very slowly. I've tried everything, running speed tests and changing my download region but nothing seems to help. I sent in a ticket but I probably won't get a reply for five to six centuries.

If you can't tell, I'm just a tad annoyed about this.

[Ragelabs]

Have you tried to pause and then resume the download?

[zweitdivisionar]

Many, many times.

[Ragelabs]

Sorry to hear that. :(

[DrRockzo]

same problem. happened the other night too....just keep switching download servers until you find one that works. the servers are congested with people downloading or updating

[aiusepsi]

It's actually doing file patching work, it's just not exposed very well in the current Steam UI. If you use the Resource Monitor program in Windows you'll see that Steam is working away on the files. Just let it be and it'll finish.

I can explain in greater detail exactly what it's doing if you like.

[zweitdivisionar]

Yes, yes! It would be much appreciated. Also, this happens every single time I'm downloading something on Steam.
I can see it's still downloading but it just seems as if it takes much, much longer than it should.

[EverReddie]

Originally posted by zweitdivisionar:

Yes, yes! It would be much appreciated. Also, this happens every single time I'm downloading something on Steam.
I can see it's still downloading but it just seems as if it takes much, much longer than it should.

It's probably a really big game, so it might quite a while to download.

[aiusepsi]

Ok. So every game on Steam is broken down into chunks that are approximately 1 MB in size. For each version of the game, there's a manifest that tells you how to assemble those chunks into the game's files.

When the developers release an update, Steam analyses the files, and works out how it can make the files out of chunks it already knows about. If there's anything entirely new, that gets uploaded as new chunks.

Now, when Steam finds out there's a new update been released for one of your games, it goes and grabs the manifest for it, and compares that against the manifest for what you already have installed. It works out which files have been modified, and it allocates space for that new file. It goes through and works out for that file which chunks it needs to download, and which it can copy over from what's already installed.

Once all the new modified files are built out of their chunks, they're moved over to the game's install folder. That has the benefit that it doesn't trash your existing install while the patching is in progress, which is good if you need to go into offline mode in a hurry, and they're almost certainly going to soon enable a feature to skip updates in progress.

So, what does this have to do with your symptoms? Well, say you have ten large files, say a gigabyte each, and you change maybe 2 MB in each. When Steam's building each of those files, it'll have to download 2 MB of new chunks, and copy 998 MB of existing chunks from your existing install, per file. Total download winds up at 20 MB, but you end up copying nearly 10 GB. You end up spending ages just waiting for those copies to happen; you become bound by the speed of the file copying.

That's why download speed isn't a problem when you're just installing from scratch, there's no excessive copying to get stuck behind. It really only becomes a problem when the amount of copying is significantly more than the amount of downloading.

Part of the trouble here is that Steam internally has three progress counters (well, four, but that's not relevant right now). One is bytes downloaded, one is bytes reused (from the existing store) and one is bytes successfully written out to the new modified files, and it only really exposes that first one in the UI, so you think that the process has stalled when it hasn't.

If you're interested, there's a file Steam/logs/content_log.txt which actually includes the count in bytes for download, reuse, and how much has been written out (which is labelled as staged). There's another one, store, which is for installs off retail disks and backups. You'll see for Rome 2 that the total amount of reuse really is around 10 GB.

What could be done to make this better is for CA to stop making small changes to lots of large files, wherever possible.

Apart from improving the UI, there's not much that can be done on the Steam end. The copying is necessary because any other algorithm would be more fiddly and error prone and lead to file fragmentation, and coalescing the downloads together into a block wouldn't help, because ultimately your total patch time is totally bound by the copy speed.

[zweitdivisionar]

Oh okay. I get it now. Thanks a bunch for helping me out! Much appreciated.

[TacticalFaux]

IT HELPS TO CHANGE THE DOWNLOAD REGION, but, the key to it is to set it to someplace where there isn't a lot of traffic. The reason we can't download is because the server are completely swamped for whatever reason, Christmas sale, it simply being noon, or whatever. The point is if you set it to New York at a time where everyone is on your downloads aren't going to make any progress. Although if you are on 7-10 AM EST then if you set it to Seattle (Valve's home base) or somewhere in California there won't be many people on since it is 4-7 in the morning over there. You could always set it to a low traffic area like Vietnam or West Africa, but if you live in the USA like myself, you won't have a good connection to it anyway.

[MEASUREHEAD]

This might be really late... but. I just had this problem myself. What I did was start downloading the game, and then hit 'Play'. It then soon went to 0 bytes, then after about a minute, its started to download again. It then would stop and start in this fashion, until it finally downloaded quite some time later. The game worked fine.

[Anger Gingermane]

Originally posted by aiusepsi:

Ok. So every game on Steam is broken down into chunks that are approximately 1 MB in size. For each version of the game, there's a manifest that tells you how to assemble those chunks into the game's files.

When the developers release an update, Steam analyses the files, and works out how it can make the files out of chunks it already knows about. If there's anything entirely new, that gets uploaded as new chunks.

Now, when Steam finds out there's a new update been released for one of your games, it goes and grabs the manifest for it, and compares that against the manifest for what you already have installed. It works out which files have been modified, and it allocates space for that new file. It goes through and works out for that file which chunks it needs to download, and which it can copy over from what's already installed.

Once all the new modified files are built out of their chunks, they're moved over to the game's install folder. That has the benefit that it doesn't trash your existing install while the patching is in progress, which is good if you need to go into offline mode in a hurry, and they're almost certainly going to soon enable a feature to skip updates in progress.

So, what does this have to do with your symptoms? Well, say you have ten large files, say a gigabyte each, and you change maybe 2 MB in each. When Steam's building each of those files, it'll have to download 2 MB of new chunks, and copy 998 MB of existing chunks from your existing install, per file. Total download winds up at 20 MB, but you end up copying nearly 10 GB. You end up spending ages just waiting for those copies to happen; you become bound by the speed of the file copying.

That's why download speed isn't a problem when you're just installing from scratch, there's no excessive copying to get stuck behind. It really only becomes a problem when the amount of copying is significantly more than the amount of downloading.

Part of the trouble here is that Steam internally has three progress counters (well, four, but that's not relevant right now). One is bytes downloaded, one is bytes reused (from the existing store) and one is bytes successfully written out to the new modified files, and it only really exposes that first one in the UI, so you think that the process has stalled when it hasn't.

If you're interested, there's a file Steam/logs/content_log.txt which actually includes the count in bytes for download, reuse, and how much has been written out (which is labelled as staged). There's another one, store, which is for installs off retail disks and backups. You'll see for Rome 2 that the total amount of reuse really is around 10 GB.

What could be done to make this better is for CA to stop making small changes to lots of large files, wherever possible.

Apart from improving the UI, there's not much that can be done on the Steam end. The copying is necessary because any other algorithm would be more fiddly and error prone and lead to file fragmentation, and coalescing the downloads together into a block wouldn't help, because ultimately your total patch time is totally bound by the copy speed.

Okay, if that truly is the case, then why is it I'm having this same problem with Space Engineers... a game with barely over 1 GB of install data yet I've been having this problem for 48 hours straight. Now, my computer isn't top of the line as it's 4 years old, but it was when I built it. I'm pretty sure it should handle copying 1 GB worth of file data in a 48 hour period. Secondly, I've deleted and downloaded the game again and it goes through the whole process in about 4 minutes (because I have a 50 Mbit connection) and then sits and hangs at 0 bytes of 0 bytes. Verifying file integrity comes up successful but doesn't change the problem. (As mentioned) Deleting and redownloading the game has no effect. Further, it's not just one game... Rust AND Space Engineers are doing it now. On top of that, what makes this even more strange is both games will play just fine and have been completely updated. All the latest update content is in the games and they run fine. The only reason this is a problem is they both sit at the top of my update queue, never moving, always holding up the line... so as of now, I no longer have automatic updates because I have to manually cycle the priority list in order to get things to actually work.

[Jabba]

i have this problem with CSGO, I just exit steam and restart it

[Pepo]

It could be caused by malware, try this method it is worth trying this worked on my friend pc when he had this problem.(altough he had malwares too)

First uninstall all suspicious programs such as random search engines. Then use free version of this tool https://www.malwarebytes.org/, after you have done that do the following:

1. Run Chrome as Administrator.
2. Go to the settings in Chrome.
3. Go to Advanced Settings (its all the way down).
4. Scroll to Network Section and click on ''Change proxy settings''.
5. A window will pop up with the name ''Internet Properties''
6. Click on ''LAN settings''
7. Un-check ''Use a proxy server for your LAN''
8. Check ''Automatically detect settings''
9. Click everything ''OK'' and you are done!

You might have to run scanner again just to be sure. BTW this was originaly posted by user Sturlei on a YT video :)

[Clodolt]

For me,i just right click on the game in Library click Local Files,then Verify Game Cache.
After its doone just start installing it again ;)