Downloading stuck at 0B/s

[ArinzaRunza]

hello everyone, recently I've been having some serious problems installing any game from steam: the download either gets stuck at 0B/s or goes up in speed and then goes back to 0B/s at random intervals. I have tried:

- Uninstalling and reinstalling steam
- Flushing dns cache from cmd
- obvious things like restarting pc etc.
- removing cache from steam download options
- checking windows firewall and network settings

this happens with any game I try to install, the only "solution" I've found is to pause the download every so often, wait for it to stop completely, and then restart it, giving it a small speed boost but for very little time.

the same doesn't happen with epic launcher or any other client, and it's not a network speed problem (I have 1gb/s).

thanks in advance

screen --> https://imgur.com/a/avs45Eo

[Elucidator]

It sounds like your disk may be used by something other than Steam, and that activity takes priority over Steam's download task for whatever reason.

A couple of things are required to know:
-> You're downloading to an internal drive I assume, not an external, USB connected device?
(Why this is important: Windows by default has power saving features disabling the USB connection if Windows thinks the USB device is currently not being used by the User. Steam downloads at SYSTEM privilege level which is initiated from a background 'service' called SteamClientService, which means Windows thinks its a background task.)
If you are using a USB connected device, you need to optimize its settings so that it is Always Powered.

-> You investigated whether or not the Disk, your download location, is healthy? (You can use tools like CrystalDiskInfo to get information on this)
Steam needs 2x the amount of space the game requires free on the disk so that it can assemble and decompress the packages. (If there isn't enough space, you get disk write errors)

-> Is Steam installed on the same disk?
(If not, Steam may download files to the installation directory of Steam (which is a bug), rather than the Library location.)

----

I recommend the following:
try investigating what your PC is doing while you're letting it download your game.
Also read the steam logs. (see the installation directory, / logs folder.)

As for why Epic, etc. downloads at optimal speed. It's because this task is initiated from the USER privileges, not as a background service from SYSTEM which steam does. As such the download is prioritized, as it sees it as a user initiated task for one.