Question What's causing spikes in usage of my bandwidth?

ijustliketogame

Commendable
May 20, 2018
16
0
1,510
Randomly my games will completely freeze due to lag, and when I check it's frequently due to an app uploading something and utilizing the entirety of my upload bandwidth.

I've included a screenshot of Siege being monitored by Glasswire, I have no idea what's causing this. It's only been happening recently in the five months, it hasn't always been like this even with my current speeds.

72syBU1.png


I live in a rural area where my speeds are 7Mbps down 0.5 Mbps up, so uploads like this use quite a bit.

I've also noticed that the Steam client will use all my bandwidth for both download and upload, even though nothing is happening in the client itself.

I appreciate any help.
 
Last edited:
This is the huge problem you have when your are one of the unfortunate people that can't get modern internet. DSL has advanced so it can get rates of say 50mbps down and 5-10 up on lines that used to only support rates like you have. The telco though must make the investment in equipment which many times they will not if they have no competition.

A game itself is expect to use around .5mbps upload so you have no room for anything else. There are a handful of games that now require closed to 1mbps upload rates.

You need to go though task manager as stop as much junk as you can when you are playing games.

Steam unfortunately must be active if you are running games you own via steam. It tends to be pretty smart. It knows when you are running a game and will not download stuff when the game is running....there is a option to over ride that. What I have found though is if you have the steam client open on a different monitor it will still run its crap scrolling game advertising. This I assume is using bandwidth. If it is running minimized or behind the game screen it does not seem to do this. Many web pages constantly download advertising so you want to close all web browsers.
 
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ijustliketogame

Commendable
May 20, 2018
16
0
1,510
This is the huge problem you have when your are one of the unfortunate people that can't get modern internet. DSL has advanced so it can get rates of say 50mbps down and 5-10 up on lines that used to only support rates like you have. The telco though must make the investment in equipment which many times they will not if they have no competition.

A game itself is expect to use around .5mbps upload so you have no room for anything else. There are a handful of games that now require closed to 1mbps upload rates.

You need to go though task manager as stop as much junk as you can when you are playing games.

Steam unfortunately must be active if you are running games you own via steam. It tends to be pretty smart. It knows when you are running a game and will not download stuff when the game is running....there is a option to over ride that. What I have found though is if you have the steam client open on a different monitor it will still run its crap scrolling game advertising. This I assume is using bandwidth. If it is running minimized or behind the game screen it does not seem to do this. Many web pages constantly download advertising so you want to close all web browsers.

Yeah I live in Canada where the "Big 3" seem to not care about anything that's not the largest cities in the country. It's interesting though, as I said earlier this never used to happen in the last 5 years. It's only been a problem more recently and I can't seem to pin down what exactly caused the change. I'd say sometime around February the issue has popped up. Did these games suddenly change how they're handling connections and I'm just unaware?

And with Steam, I've always got it minimized. I've got it scheduled so that it will not download at all during when I play, but somehow it still utilizes the entirety of my download and upload speeds. It's not as if it's using a little bit of each speed, it's completely maxing out. When I'm playing something, I've never got anything open but Discord and the game itself. I don't use the Steam web browser, so I'm not entirely sure why it's telling me that Steam is hogging the entirety of my bandwidth for both download and upload.
 

ijustliketogame

Commendable
May 20, 2018
16
0
1,510
Remember steam uses rates in MBYTES. I have never tried setting the limit on such a small connection. Can you set it to say .5mbytes. Still even if you can the problem is you may get brusts of data above that rate.
I'm aware it's in mbytes, but it only affects when I actually want to download a game, it never has anything to do when I'm not downloading a game.