Steam downloads saturating internet

Sin_Chase said:
Thread is complicating matters.

Max out your line, everything else will suffer. End of. HTTP, P2P, FTP...pick a protocol.

It's simple, line maxed = no bandwidth left = other services suffer.

It's nothing to do with Steams implementation and everything to do with the fact Steam WILL, very often, totally saturate your available bandwidth.

Quite why you think you have a magical bandwidth reserve over your theoretical max is beyond me. You don't notice it from other HTTP sources because they don't provide enough bandwidth to saturate consistently like Steam does.
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i can stop a steam download thats going at example 10mb/s start another download using something else, which will be downloading at 12mb/s and were talking in the space of a few seconds here... when steams downloading, il get nothing at all... when im downloading elsewhere at a higher speed, its fine...

surely its not just coincidence, not the amount of times it happens...

its not the line maxing out thats the problem, a maxed out line would load a page.... eventually.
 
I noticed this last night, was trying to download Deus Ex and it "took" all my bandwith. Was trying to browse in Chrome and was getting time outs all over the place. I dont mind if browsing was slower than normal but it seems like Steam doesnt want to share at all.
 
Ugley_Matt said:
I noticed this last night, was trying to download Deus Ex and it "took" all my bandwith. Was trying to browse in Chrome and was getting time outs all over the place. I dont mind if browsing was slower than normal but it seems like Steam doesnt want to share at all.
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but that is maxing the connection though... im not talking about that, mine ISNT maxing my connection, but is stopping my connection
 
I have the same issues with torrent downloads but not with steam :(

Will have 3 going at about 800 - 1MB and internet will full on stop, cant even connect to the router via IP address so im guessing its the router which cant keep up with the requests.

*torrents run on a server not on the same machine.
 
Yeah its not a problem with it maxing the line, its a problem with nothing else being able to get in on the action while its doing it.

Steam has always maxed my line, but I used to be able to browse the web fine while doing it.
 
Happens to me as well, nothing you can do about it really. Internet browsing is fine while downloading but youtube HD isn't really possible. Valve should really just add a bandwidth allocation option.
 
Steam actually brings my whole computer to crawl when it downloads something. Most noticeably with Dota 2, for some reason. Doesn't affect my internet much, but my computer slows down a lot. It's not like I have a bad computer either (i5 2500k, 4gb ram etc)
 
Not quite what you were asking but it's what I thought of when I read the thread title, apparently a recent update to DotA2 accounted for approximately 2% of all internet traffic at the time it was released.

That's like, at least a couple of gigabytes! :p
 
Sin_Chase said:
Thread is complicating matters.

Max out your line, everything else will suffer. End of. HTTP, P2P, FTP...pick a protocol.

It's simple, line maxed = no bandwidth left = other services suffer.

It's nothing to do with Steams implementation and everything to do with the fact Steam WILL, very often, totally saturate your available bandwidth.

Quite why you think you have a magical bandwidth reserve over your theoretical max is beyond me. You don't notice it from other HTTP sources because they don't provide enough bandwidth to saturate consistently like Steam does.
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Lets assume what you say is correct. In such a scenario, the question is WHY does Steam consistently saturate my connection so much more than other sources? Why do other sources with ample bandwidth that can upload at orders of magnitude greater than my theoretical max not have the same effect? You say it is nothing to do with Steam's implementation, but if there is a difference, then it must be even if indirectly!

The bottom line is that even if I am somehow using more bandwidth on steam, it is highly undesirable at times when I am using the internet for something else because there is no noticeable difference in speed and a massive degredation in performance of competing applications that are contended with it. I'd rather have 415k/sec max and adequate browsing (as I see with other applications, at least single threaded ones) than 415.1k/sec max and timeouts all over the shop.

I may look into some sort of speed limiter again, but I haven't had to use one for a very long time (looking in my apps folder, the last version of Netlimiter I downloaded was over 7 years ago!) and that was more to do with limiting my upload to ensure ack packets could get through.
 
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Why are you leaving it running in the background? It's not only using bandwidth it's also using resources on your computer.

Steam only runs for me when I play a game, other than that I make sure its out of sight and out of mind.

Unless I'm missing something here?

N.B. I still don't think you're quite getting it. Any service with sufficient bandwidth available will saturate your connection if it gets the chance and if you don't limit it. Thats why bit torrent clients for example have the option to limit upload/download speeds so you have some bandwidth left available for other things i.e. web surfing.

HangTime said:
Why do other sources with ample bandwidth that can upload at orders of magnitude greater than my theoretical max not have the same effect?
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They're not saturating the line because they don't have the bandwidth available to do so from the server end, you just think they are.

C64 said:
Go in to settings and change [to] somewhere else that gets slightly below your max speed.
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This.
 
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Blackjack Davy said:
Why are you leaving it running in the background? It's not only using bandwidth it's also using resources on your computer.

Steam only runs for me when I play a game, other than that I make sure its out of sight and out of mind.

Unless I'm missing something here?

N.B. I still don't think you're quite getting it. Any service with sufficient bandwidth available will saturate your connection if it gets the chance and if you don't limit it. Thats why bit torrent clients for example have the option to limit upload/download speeds so you have some bandwidth left available for other things i.e. web surfing.



They're not, you just think they are, and they can't upload faster than your connection will allow, thats against the laws of physics!



This.
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I personally use it as my main instant messaging program. I prefer having it open all the time.
 
Blackjack Davy said:
Why are you leaving it running in the background? It's not only using bandwidth it's also using resources on your computer.

Steam only runs for me when I play a game, other than that I make sure its out of sight and out of mind.

Unless I'm missing something here?
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You're missing one of the better features of Steam, the background updating, no more waiting for your game to launch due to it updating.
 
Blackjack Davy said:
Why are you leaving it running in the background? It's not only using bandwidth it's also using resources on your computer.

Steam only runs for me when I play a game, other than that I make sure its out of sight and out of mind.
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Why? Do you have a really ancient machine?
 
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