Steam was downloading at high speed and suddenly dropped to low speed

[GlitchyBit]

I use ASUS ROG Flow X16 which has a MediaTek 160MHz Wifi model, but I use ethernet which gives consistent speed. When I downloaded Apex Legends on Steam with Throttling disabled I got 55-60MBPS download speed IN STEAM. But the games that were in queue after that the speed dropped to like 100KBPS. I tried clearing the download cache and relogging into Steam, but it didn't work. I tried clearing the temporary files of apps to free the RAM, that didn't work either. If it helps, I just installed a FireCuda 530 1TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD onto the second slot of my laptop yesterday. It has up to 7300MBPS read/write speed. I still can't figure out the problem, can someone please help me out?

[Illusion of Progress]

The"up to" read/write speeds on SSDs are exactly that. They aren't the speeds you'll often see for many workflows, because many workflows aren't raw bandwidth limited. The simple matter is, the speeds offered by NVMe drives, at least from the higher peak bandwidth numbers themselves, doesn't make a noticeable difference for most tasks. If you were copying data from one drive to another, then sure, that peak sequential speed would be the limitation (and even then that "up to" refers to best case [think faster SLC/cache practices] scenarios, and not the speed you may see it drop to as a baseline if the operation is large/long enough). If you want an easy example, download a Minectaft resource pack. These are often freely available and tiny in size (double digit MB at most). Try extracting this and you might be shocked at the crawling, KB/s speeds you see.

https://polyflore.net/projects/depixel

You can probably download that in under a second, but it might take 15 to 30 to extract.

Steam is sort of the same way. Steam has to uncompress and install things as it downloads them.

Steam also reports things in terms of bytes like OSes do, not in terms of bits like ISPs do. One byte is eight bits, so when Steam shows you downloading around 60 MB/s, your download speed in ISP terms is ~480 Mb/s. But it will vary as the process goes on as it has to do other things at times, as said.

In other words, your system doesn't seem to be doing anything wrong to me. Well, without knowing what your download speed is I can't say, but Steam not maxing it out all the time wouldn't be something I'd presume is disastrous anyway.

[GlitchyBit]

Right now it's on 138KB/s, it just got way lesser. I tried uninstalling the game. When I selected Install again it showed 10 hours and 39 minutes at 138KB/s. That's just mad, I've tested my SSD's health, and my speedtest keeps showing 240 Megabytes per second (mbps). Please help me out, I can't figurer out what to do.

[GlitchyBit]

Originally posted by Illusion of Progress:

The"up to" read/write speeds on SSDs are exactly that. They aren't the speeds you'll often see for many workflows, because many workflows aren't raw bandwidth limited. The simple matter is, the speeds offered by NVMe drives, at least from the higher peak bandwidth numbers themselves, doesn't make a noticeable difference for most tasks. If you were copying data from one drive to another, then sure, that peak sequential speed would be the limitation (and even then that "up to" refers to best case [think faster SLC/cache practices] scenarios, and not the speed you may see it drop to as a baseline if the operation is large/long enough). If you want an easy example, download a Minectaft resource pack. These are often freely available and tiny in size (double digit MB at most). Try extracting this and you might be shocked at the crawling, KB/s speeds you see.

https://polyflore.net/projects/depixel

You can probably download that in under a second, but it might take 15 to 30 to extract.

Steam is sort of the same way. Steam has to uncompress and install things as it downloads them.

Steam also reports things in terms of bytes like OSes do, not in terms of bits like ISPs do. One byte is eight bits, so when Steam shows you downloading around 60 MB/s, your download speed in ISP terms is ~480 Mb/s. But it will vary as the process goes on as it has to do other things at times, as said.

In other words, your system doesn't seem to be doing anything wrong to me. Well, without knowing what your download speed is I can't say, but Steam not maxing it out all the time wouldn't be something I'd presume is disastrous anyway.

Forgot to quote you, sorry about that. My download speed is 240MBPS and Upload is 235MBPS according to speedtest.net by Ookla.

[Illusion of Progress]

Oh, wait, you're saying dropping to very slow speeds when downloading and STAYING there? Sorry, I misunderstood. I've seen others mention this happening to them, but I'm not sure what the cause or fix is. Maybe someone else can give better feedback than me.

I do believe the people who've experienced this say they often get around the problem by downloading to another drive, and then moving the install to the intended drive. If that's something you can do, it might be an option (you say it's a second drive so i presume it is, as long as the primary drive has enough free space for it temporarily).

[CursedPanther]

My experience tells me that the closest Steam download server to your current location is often not the best, and they are definitely not created to the same specs. It's only a logical decision as Valve needs to be efficient with the maintenance cost and make a balance base on typical regional demands.

I'm on the Steam client beta branch so I get a version update pretty much every other day. Depending on what Valve has changed to the client, whenever I notice my game update slow down to a 10MByte/s then I'll just manually select a download server that I've got a high download speed previously and it shoots right back up to 80+MByte/s. It works 100% of the time.

Not a guaranteed solution to all Steam related network problems but definitely worth a try.

[GlitchyBit]

I tried changing the region, no use. I also tried uninstalling and installing Steam all over again, that didn't work either. It got 50 Kb/s slower than usual. It's just Steam btw, Epic Games, Battle.net and other engines are able to use both my Wi-Fi and Ethernet upto atleast 20mbps. Idk what happened to Steam, it downloaded Apex on like 60Mb/s and suddenly went crazy and drastically reduced the speed.

[GlitchyBit]

Can anyone please help me out?

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

My experience tells me that the closest Steam download server to your current location is often not the best, and they are definitely not created to the same specs. It's only a logical decision as Valve needs to be efficient with the maintenance cost and make a balance base on typical regional demands.

I'm on the Steam client beta branch so I get a version update pretty much every other day. Depending on what Valve has changed to the client, whenever I notice my game update slow down to a 10MByte/s then I'll just manually select a download server that I've got a high download speed previously and it shoots right back up to 80+MByte/s. It works 100% of the time.

Not a guaranteed solution to all Steam related network problems but definitely worth a try.

[GlitchyBit]

Originally posted by Illusion of Progress:

Oh, wait, you're saying dropping to very slow speeds when downloading and STAYING there? Sorry, I misunderstood. I've seen others mention this happening to them, but I'm not sure what the cause or fix is. Maybe someone else can give better feedback than me.

I do believe the people who've experienced this say they often get around the problem by downloading to another drive, and then moving the install to the intended drive. If that's something you can do, it might be an option (you say it's a second drive so i presume it is, as long as the primary drive has enough free space for it temporarily).

I also tried using my C Drive as the drive to download games into. I tried downloading Aim Labs, the speeds only going up to 1.1 Mb/s.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

When you monitor a drive during something like a download of a game. The writing on-disk can only go as fast as whatever the software is downloading at.

So either your WiFi or ISP is to blame. Or the Steam download server. Users are free to try any server in the list. As closest won't always be best, especially at peak times of day. Change server via Steam > Settings > Downloads and see how that goes.

It shouldn't matter which drive you download to, as long as it's an SSD. Otherwise it might go slower or heavily tie up system resources if it's a mechanical HDD

[GlitchyBit]

I use a SeaGate FireCude 530 2TB SSD which is pretty expensive for a reason. But yeah I guess the servers are a problem. But I tried changing to two other servers in my region and speed dropped by 100Kb/s haha.

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

When you monitor a drive during something like a download of a game. The writing on-disk can only go as fast as whatever the software is downloading at.

So either your WiFi or ISP is to blame. Or the Steam download server. Users are free to try any server in the list. As closest won't always be best, especially at peak times of day. Change server via Steam > Settings > Downloads and see how that goes.

It shouldn't matter which drive you download to, as long as it's an SSD. Otherwise it might go slower or heavily tie up system resources if it's a mechanical HDD

[Set-115689]

Temperatures ok? Cpu does some of the work also.

[GlitchyBit]

Originally posted by Set-115689:

Temperatures ok? Cpu does some of the work also.

Yeah no problem with that, I use a laptop stand that has multiple fans to cool it down quite a bit. So the temperature is under control.

Actually I changed to server to a much farther one and it seems to work. From 60Kb/s It jumped to 60Mb/s. Trust me I'm very shocked.

[DeadBeat]

Originally posted by GlitchyBit:

Actually I changed to server to a much farther one and it seems to work. From 60Kb/s It jumped to 60Mb/s. Trust me I'm very shocked.

If you notice your download speeds tanking again check the download region as Steam has this habit of reverting back to the local server after an update.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Some games on Steam do not simply download straight on through; especially if its a game update. It might need to pause during the downloading process to take a few moments to recompile files on the local disk side. During this time it will appear as though nothing is working or downloading. The process will continue normally as time passes.

[GlitchyBit]

Originally posted by DeadBeat:

Originally posted by GlitchyBit:

Actually I changed to server to a much farther one and it seems to work. From 60Kb/s It jumped to 60Mb/s. Trust me I'm very shocked.

If you notice your download speeds tanking again check the download region as Steam has this habit of reverting back to the local server after an update.

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

Some games on Steam do not simply download straight on through; especially if its a game update. It might need to pause during the downloading process to take a few moments to recompile files on the local disk side. During this time it will appear as though nothing is working or downloading. The process will continue normally as time passes.

They really have to fix the servers, guys. The rate limiter seems to be too low for a big Gaming Platform like Steam.