Unstable download speed on Steam?

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

Hello. Whenever I try to download anything on Steam, the download speed (along with the disk write speed) keeps going up and down like this:
obraz

  • I installed steam using pacman -S steam.
  • I’m using wireless connection.
  • Anywhere else, the download speed is stable.
  • This doesn’t happen on Windows 10.
  • I tried the fix for slow downloads on Linux Steam, suggested in few online threads:
@nClientDownloadEnableHTTP2PlatformLinux 0
@fDownloadRateImprovementToAddAnotherConnection 1
@cMaxInitialDownloadSources 15

but it did not help.

Any idea what might cause this?

2

Couldn’t tell you in the slightest. It has always used less of my bandwidth on linux as far as I know. I have been on linux for years now and I have just learned to live with it. My brother has a window PC with similar specs, so I know it must be something they are doing on the linux side. If I have a vpn on it is even slower. Without a vpn it takes quite a while to build up to a decent speed and fluctuates more than I would like, but it isn’t so bad that I find it a deal breaker.

Anyways, just adding my experience because I am also wonder how other people’s experiences have been. I’m sure it must work fine for some people. One example I can give that I tested just now while typing up this comment was trying to download a large game like Apex Legends. It reached a peak speed of about 340.8 Mbps after about 5 minutes. On average it seems to hover around 280 mbps while I know for certain that other people with gigabit speeds can get their full bandwidth or at least close to it.

Edit (Update): After about 12 minutes my new peak speed is 443 Mbps and it is currently averaging about 311 mbps. Still not what it should be, but clearly it seems to work its way up although it isn’t consistent and should achieve and maintain a maximum speed much sooner in my opinion.

1 Like
3

I remember having this issue early on and just switching to the Flatpak version worked for me. No idea on the details as to why. I was just glad to get it working :stuck_out_tongue:

4

I used to use the flatpak version before switching to the system version. It has been the same either way on my end.

1 Like
5

Did your download graph also look like this? Well I’ll try Flatpak tomorrow and see if it works.

6

No difference on Flatpak, it is still jumpy unfortunately.