Question Why does my Steam download start fast, then stop and start VERY slowly and stay at that slow pace ?

[llfab]

Summary: When I start my download it starts off fast, then after 4-5 seconds, it stops completely and starts again MUCH slower and stays at that slow pace.


So I am trying to download payday 2 at the moment and I have run into a problem, I have 500Mbps average download speed and 70Mbps upload speed (posted in screenshot)

Although I have such high speeds, my steam download is downloading at this speed. (shown in screenshot below):

I was wondering why it was being so slow and dropping down to 0Mbps every couple seconds.

I have tried everything online such as:

• Changing download location
• Clearing download cache,
• Removing proxy,
• Lowering disk usage and
• Changing bandwidth limit

I don't know if time has anything to do with it but the time is currently 1:30AM.
It has been like this for other downloads too not just this one game, I noticed it however, when downloading this game as we had just got this faster internet in our home!
Anyone have any advice?

 

[bill001g]

These type of problems are very hard to diagnose since you do not have a lot of control. It could be the server limiting you in some way or maybe the software client has a limit or some bug. It is not likely a generic network issue.

Do you have another machine in your house you can test with. Maybe create some huge files and copy them between the machines and see if it has similar issues. Problem is simple file sharing is different but even if you were to say setup a web server in your house this still does not match the way steam downloads. Steam is closer to a torrent download where it run multiple parallel streams....but it does not always do this and I have not figured out when it uses this feature and when it does not.

I have never figured out why steam performance varies so much for me. What I know it does is rather than download constantly and then install or unpack files or whatever it will stop the download and do lots of disk io and then start downloading again rather than doing both at the same time. Other times it will download really fast and then spend 20 minutes installing....when you get fast internet the bottleneck is not the network it seems.

 

[gggplaya]

Are you installing this onto a SSD, is that SSD near full? If so, then for new drives like QLC, they get extremely slow write speeds when full. Once the SSD cache fills up after 4-5 seconds, you're at the mercy of the memory controller speed writing to the memory. Which is slow.

Read speeds are still generally very good even when near full capacity.

 

[llfab]

Are you installing this onto a SSD, is that SSD near full? If so, then for new drives like QLC, they get extremely slow write speeds when full. Once the SSD cache fills up after 4-5 seconds, you're at the mercy of the memory controller speed writing to the memory. Which is slow.

Read speeds are still generally very good even when near full capacity.

Nah, installing onto a hard drive which is not even half way full.

 

[gggplaya]

Nah, installing onto a hard drive which is not even half way full.

You mean a normal magnetic hard drive? 15mbps is still slow, even for a magnetic drive, unless it's an SMR hard drive, which have extremely slow write speeds. It would make sense that it starts the download fast as the cache on the hard drive fills up, then get slow very quickly.

What model hard drive is it?? Type "Disk Management" in cortana. You'll see program that says "create and format hard drive disk partitions." Click on your disk and hit properties, it should says what model number disk drive it is.

 

[drivinfast247]

Steam also processes/installs the game while downloading so if you have a slower/busy system it'll be affected.