Slow Steam downloads?

[Grogan]

I've had somewhat shitty downloads in Steam for some time now, often not getting it at my full speed (which isn't exactly breakneck by today's standards... I have a 100 Mbit connection, that's about 120'ish so I get 14 to 15 Mb/s downloads at most).

However, nothing like my nephew had. We noticed it right away last week, around 6 Mb/sec mostly, maybe going up to 8 briefly. Now, he's got a 1.5 Gbit Internet connection so that's bollocks. His Steam downloads in Windows aren't like that, it's a Linux client issue. We tried choosing different servers in the drop list, but the download behaviour was consistent. Not just then, but all the time. It put him off even using it because he didn't want to download games.

I scoured around for a solution tonight and found that some were saying it was because of http2 protocols causing some sort of constipation. Also, a second line that is supposed to get Steam to connect to multiple servers, but that one doesn't seem to do much, or doesn't work as advertised

Create a file named steam_dev.cfg in the Steam root with the following:

Code: Select all

@nClientDownloadEnableHTTP2PlatformLinux 0
@fDownloadRateImprovementToAddAnotherConnection 1.0

His issue was definitely the http2. This upped his download speeds to 40 Mb/sec (from varying between 6 and 8) which seems to be the max he can get from the content distribution network (servers, route etc.)

I dropped that in too, but I'm not sure how much, or if it helped me at all. I'm going between about 9 Mb/sec and 14, up and down. It could be time of use, but my shittier downloads could be more MTU related. (I'll see about that).

[Zema Bus]

I'll give that a try.

[Grogan]

LOL... don't tell me this was it. I've been struggling with shitty Steam downloads for a while, and tonight I went in to look again at the download settings and decided to untick "Throttle downloads while streaming" and suddenly BOINGGGG! downloads go up to a steady 12 Mb/s and stay there. I haven't seen it do that in several months, it can't be a coincidence. (and I had removed the tweak in the above post because it wasn't doing me a lick of good)

I always ignored that setting because I don't do "streaming" on Steam so why would it affect me? But I forgot this is Steam, which on Linux, is quite frankly a horrible application. I'm glad to have it, but I wish they'd fix that kludgy client.

It still hasn't moved, it's been a steady, straight column graph all this time (I've had this composition up for a bit, side tracked on other tabs etc. lol)

If that's it, what a dumbass thing. It doesn't stop monitoring it, so it induces latency and screws up the download stream (that's what it would be)

[Zema Bus]

I just disabled that in mine. The one above it which is disabled by default "Allow downloads during gameplay" is sort of related to "Throttle downloads while streaming", I guess for people who want downloads during gameplay but want them throttled while streaming. But it seems like with the first one disabled it should auto disable the second one, since someone would have to be playing a game to do streaming. But we wouldn't have expected it to throttle downloads all the time, whether streaming or not lol!

[Grogan]

Yep, that stupid "throttle downloads while streaming" setting must have been it, because it's been steady 14 Mb/sec downloads since (it might take a few minutes to get up to full speed and there might be latency for other reasons sometimes etc.)

You know, proponents of satellite internet services use this buzzword string "latency doesn't matter for all but the most demanding of applications" <--- rofl, you mean like everything that downloads data on the Internet? (the consequences of latency are multiplied because it's on every packet, to and from, which affects everything, right on up to your application. They only get around it by prefetching and caching upstream from you, which only works if it's something that a lot of people are downloading on that service)

I have always allowed downloads during gaming (I just play single player games)