[SOLVED] Downloading games is ridiculously slow but when I do a speed test i get 250 download and 220 upload?

Sep 4, 2021
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Title says it all, is there some setting i need to switch to allow things like steam and battle.net to access my full network speed?
 
Solution
That speed's not unusual for battle.net. Just because you have the capacity doesn't mean the place you're downloading from will use all that capacity. I have 400 megabits per second download, meaning I have a theoretical max around 50 megabytes per second download and I'm only getting 24 megabytes per second from battle.net at the moment (it just so happened that CoD is updating as I make this post). Things like the server load and infrastructure elsewhere in your area are big factors too, neither of which you can control.

500 kilobytes per second for Steam is far more concerning. Have you checked your settings?

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DSzymborski

Titan
Moderator
That speed's not unusual for battle.net. Just because you have the capacity doesn't mean the place you're downloading from will use all that capacity. I have 400 megabits per second download, meaning I have a theoretical max around 50 megabytes per second download and I'm only getting 24 megabytes per second from battle.net at the moment (it just so happened that CoD is updating as I make this post). Things like the server load and infrastructure elsewhere in your area are big factors too, neither of which you can control.

500 kilobytes per second for Steam is far more concerning. Have you checked your settings?

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Solution
Speedtest is just a file download that is not saved. You could try microsoft for example and try to download a windows 10 image with the browser. Microsoft has huge internet connections.

Both battlenet and steam use their own downloaders that do not use standard ports.

Check that you do not have any for of QoS software running on your PC. Many times this is called "gamer" network accelerators. It is bundled with some motherboards and video cards. The worst offender is the older killer chipset before intel bought them. You want to uninstall any of that crap.

You can also check the router for QoS stuff but generally you have to manually turn that on it is off by default if your router has the feature.

...........a added thought do you have a 2.5g ethernet port. Lot of people report strange issues like this because of buggy drivers for those chipset.
 
Sep 4, 2021
5
0
10
That speed's not unusual for battle.net. Just because you have the capacity doesn't mean the place you're downloading from will use all that capacity. I have 400 megabits per second download, meaning I have a theoretical max around 50 megabytes per second download and I'm only getting 24 megabytes per second from battle.net at the moment (it just so happened that CoD is updating as I make this post). Things like the server load and infrastructure elsewhere in your area are big factors too, neither of which you can control.

500 kilobytes per second for Steam is far more concerning. Have you checked your settings?

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My steam settings are good no limits on my download speed
 
Sep 4, 2021
5
0
10
Speedtest is just a file download that is not saved. You could try microsoft for example and try to download a windows 10 image with the browser. Microsoft has huge internet connections.

Both battlenet and steam use their own downloaders that do not use standard ports.

Check that you do not have any for of QoS software running on your PC. Many times this is called "gamer" network accelerators. It is bundled with some motherboards and video cards. The worst offender is the older killer chipset before intel bought them. You want to uninstall any of that crap.

You can also check the router for QoS stuff but generally you have to manually turn that on it is off by default if your router has the feature.

...........a added thought do you have a 2.5g ethernet port. Lot of people report strange issues like this because of buggy drivers for those chipset.
I don't really know what QoS software is but i have an ethernet port i will check if it is 2.5g
 
Sep 4, 2021
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I did more research and my its not my ethernet because when i connected to the super fast wifi we have it was also incredibly slow and now my speed test is giving me 4 megabyte download
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
What are you installing onto?

Steam Download can be slower if you downloading to a HDD

The patches are delta files. They basically tell steam "hey go look at this part of the file and change these bits". Rather than "here is the entire file again, even though we added like 1 digit at the end of the file"

This allows the download itself to e much smaller.

The down side is that locally it uses more CPU and disk to process these files. It essentially

  1. Gets a list of 'changes' it needs ot make from the patch file
  2. reads the entire original file
  3. processes what parts need changing
  4. writes out the new file with the changes

This process is both CPU and disk intensive. I have a 1GBps connection but I can only realistically get 400mbps off Steam. This is mainly due to the high compression of the files so basically my CPU is capping out how fast I can really download games from steam not my overall connection. With a fast enough CPU and an SSD drive I can get better speeds closer to my 1GBPs connection.

ssd much faster to make those changes than on hdd.