Steam slow download speeds. ANNOYING

douglatins · May 29, 2011

So i guessed that by paying for a game i could get at least half the speeds of torrent, i am downloading Witcher 2 patch and it's a 99KB/s peaking ate 300KB/s, i got the torrent at 2MB/s.

What gives?

ChewyBrownSuga · May 29, 2011

I know of one reason why you're getting slow download speed from Steam. maybe that too many people are trying to download the patch at one time chocking the severs. You could try changing your download region.

newtekie1 · May 29, 2011

douglatins said:
So i guessed that by paying for a game i could get at least half the speeds of torrent, i am downloading Witcher 2 patch and it's a 99KB/s peaking ate 300KB/s, i got the torrent at 2MB/s.

What gives?

The way a torrent works is it essentially turns every person downloading the content into a server uploading it as well, and more so every person that is just seeding it is acting as a server for others to download from.

With steam, there are only a handful of server that huge numbers of people are using to download the patch from. There just is no real way for legit servers to keep up with the download speeds of a popular item. It has a fixed amount of bandwidth for people to download the item. When someone connects to a torrent and starts to seed some of the data they've downloaded, they actually increase the amount of bandwidth available, this doesn't happen with steam.

I'll give you an example. Lets say the steam server you are connected to has a 100Mb/s upload connection. Now, there are a 1000 people download from that server. That means each person will get about 100Kb/s when downloading from that server. Now the torrent has 500 seeders, each seeding at 100Kb/s, that is 50Mb/s. And you have 2000 others downloading and seeding, and they are seeding at 100Kb/s as well. That is another 200Mb/s, for a total of 250Mb/s available to the 2000 people downloading. So each person is getting about 125Kb/s.

With a torrent you are uploading as well as downloading, with Steam you are just downloading from them. And I've had plenty of torrents with a single seeder that downloading at like 10Kb/s...

erocker · May 29, 2011

Settings>change download server

douglatins · May 29, 2011

newtekie1 said:
The way a torrent works is it essentially turns every person downloading the content into a server uploading it as well, and more so every person that is just seeding it is acting as a server for others to download from.

With steam, there are only a handful of server that huge numbers of people are using to download the patch from. There just is no real way for legit servers to keep up with the download speeds of a popular item. It has a fixed amount of bandwidth for people to download the item. When someone connects to a torrent and starts to seed some of the data they've downloaded, they actually increase the amount of bandwidth available, this doesn't happen with steam.

I'll give you an example. Lets say the steam server you are connected to has a 100Mb/s upload connection. Now, there are a 1000 people download from that server. That means each person will get about 100Kb/s when downloading from that server. Now the torrent has 500 seeders, each seeding at 100Kb/s, that is 50Mb/s. And you have 2000 others downloading and seeding, and they are seeding at 100Kb/s as well. That is another 200Mb/s, for a total of 250Mb/s available to the 2000 people downloading. So each person is getting about 125Kb/s.

With a torrent you are uploading as well as downloading, with Steam you are just downloading from them. And I've had plenty of torrents with a single seeder that downloading at like 10Kb/s...

I know, but downloading things from fast servers, like microsoft, nvidia drivers.. All get more than 1MB speeds.

Changes do SA, 27KB/s speeds

qubit · May 29, 2011

newtekie1 said:
The way a torrent works is it essentially turns every person downloading the content into a server uploading it as well, and more so every person that is just seeding it is acting as a server for others to download from.

With steam, there are only a handful of server that huge numbers of people are using to download the patch from. There just is no real way for legit servers to keep up with the download speeds of a popular item. It has a fixed amount of bandwidth for people to download the item. When someone connects to a torrent and starts to seed some of the data they've downloaded, they actually increase the amount of bandwidth available, this doesn't happen with steam.

I'll give you an example. Lets say the steam server you are connected to has a 100Mb/s upload connection. Now, there are a 1000 people download from that server. That means each person will get about 100Kb/s when downloading from that server. Now the torrent has 500 seeders, each seeding at 100Kb/s, that is 50Mb/s. And you have 2000 others downloading and seeding, and they are seeding at 100Kb/s as well. That is another 200Mb/s, for a total of 250Mb/s available to the 2000 people downloading. So each person is getting about 125Kb/s.

With a torrent you are uploading as well as downloading, with Steam you are just downloading from them. And I've had plenty of torrents with a single seeder that downloading at like 10Kb/s...

It does make you wonder why a progressive company like Valve doesn't use torrent technology. I believe WoW uses it and I know that the BBC's iPlayer does, so why not Valve?

My current ISP doesn't throttle torrents and my download bandwidth is about 18Mb. A while back, a torrent kept speeding up until it hit the max speed of my connection. It was amazing, I'd never seen anything like it with torrents before! See the attached pic.

Melvis · May 29, 2011

I wish i had your 99K speeds, i just updated COD Black Ops at a max speed of 10K all day long =/

Jstn7477 · May 29, 2011

When a patch is released via Steam, nearly all the clients (that are online and have automatic updates) download the patch at the same time, putting high strain on the servers. As an operator of SRCDS game servers for my gaming community (TF2, etc.), it can be hell sometimes even getting the servers updated with HLDSUpdateTool because of the demand, since TF2 is still a popular game. Otherwise, if I'm downloading my library on a new computer or something, I'll easily max out my connection, but some games download at different speeds, suspend, etc.

douglatins · May 29, 2011

They should have some sort of cloud based ondemand server thing then

PS: Torrent throtelling SUCKS BALLZZZZ

HammerON · May 29, 2011

erocker said:
Settings>change download server

This has worked in the past for me when I was getting slow download speeds.

ShiBDiB · May 29, 2011

Change the server to some middle of nowhere place (in ur general global area) not to another highly populated city ....

newtekie1 · May 29, 2011

douglatins said:
I know, but downloading things from fast servers, like microsoft, nvidia drivers.. All get more than 1MB speeds.

Changes do SA, 27KB/s speeds

Believe it or not, they actual servers/connections probably are not that much faster. The difference is the load on those servers are way less. When a patch comes out, every steam client that is running tries to download it all at once, there aren't nearly as many people connecting to nVidia's servers looking for drivers.

qubit said:
It does make you wonder why a progressive company like Valve doesn't use torrent technology. I believe WoW uses it and I know that the BBC's iPlayer does, so why not Valve?

My current ISP doesn't throttle torrents and my download bandwidth is about 18Mb. A while back, a torrent kept speeding up until it hit the max speed of my connection. It was amazing, I'd never seen anything like it with torrents before! See the attached pic.

You answered your own question. Their method is guaranteed to work, it might be slow, but it is reliable. Switching to a torrent technology means that you are going to have a large group of people that have even worst speeds or can't access the data at all due to ISP limiting or blocking torrent activity.

m4gicfour · May 29, 2011

newtekie1 said:
You answered your own question. Their method is guaranteed to work, it might be slow, but it is reliable. Switching to a torrent technology means that you are going to have a large group of people that have even worst speeds or can't access the data at all due to ISP limiting or blocking torrent activity.

This is why I believe more companies like valve need to start using torrent technology. Torrents aren't illegal. Sure, some of the content being downloaded via that technology is priated. Perhaps even most right now.

The technology works, and in fact, was designed for exactly this problem... The more companies start using it in high-profile, unarguably legal production software, the less the ISPs argument stands up.

Even if you don't agree, it's as simple as putting a checkbox in the settings, with torrenting defaulting to OFF. Torrents support HTTP seeds, so even if not many people use it at first, there still would be a benefit for those that do, since valve could use the standard servers as seeds. Sure Valve would have to put in time and money to code a secure, reliable system and then maintain that code along with the current system, but it would actually save valve on bandwith over the long run.

RejZoR · May 29, 2011

300KB/s is not that bad. I mean it's not like the patch for Witcher 2 is 2GB in size. Or is it? It should take couple of minutes.

As for P2P using as data transfer, well they'd have to make games cheaper as you invest your own bandwidth into their stuff. Their costs would decrease so to make it fair they should make stuff slightly cheaper to offload that difference.

qubit · May 29, 2011

newtekie1 said:
You answered your own question. Their method is guaranteed to work, it might be slow, but it is reliable. Switching to a torrent technology means that you are going to have a large group of people that have even worst speeds or can't access the data at all due to ISP limiting or blocking torrent activity.

m4gicfour has stolen my thunder for my reply!

Just make it torrent downloads an option and the problem of ISP throttling is solved.

m4gicfour said:
This is why I believe more companies like valve need to start using torrent technology. Torrents aren't illegal. Sure, some of the content being downloaded via that technology is priated. Perhaps even most right now.

The technology works, and in fact, was designed for exactly this problem... The more companies start using it in high-profile, unarguably legal production software, the less the ISPs argument stands up.

Even if you don't agree, it's as simple as putting a checkbox in the settings, with torrenting defaulting to OFF. Torrents support HTTP seeds, so even if not many people use it at first, there still would be a benefit for those that do, since valve could use the standard servers as seeds. Sure Valve would have to put in time and money to code a secure, reliable system and then maintain that code along with the current system, but it would actually save valve on bandwith over the long run.

Well, said! :toast:

m4gicfour · May 29, 2011

No, like I say, make it an option. Then if you want to not waste bandwidth, you can suffer the standard download speeds. If you want it RIGHT NOW, turn torrenting on and realise that nothing is free.

qubit said:
m4gicfour has stolen my thunder for my reply!

Just make it torrent downloads an option and the problem of ISP throttling is solved.

Well, said!

lol, Fight tha powah mang!

Seriously, though; this is exactly why throttling is wrong.

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Steam slow download speeds. ANNOYING

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