Please read through it if you are curious or do not understand how to use the program. Tom's guide has a great article on how to use this program.
If you do not know how to disable your anti-virus software or firewall, or how to whitelist programs and processes in it you must Google how to do that for your particular anti-virus or firewall. If this solves the problem, re-enable your anti-virus or firewall and whitelist Steam and it's processes, like the bootstrapper, in the anti-virus software or firewall. Please disable your anti-virus or firewall and try to launch Steam. Your anti-virus software or firewall may be blocking Steam from operating properly, or it may be scanning the download files and throttling your download. Troubleshooting Disable your anti-virus/firewall If you are having your issue during maintenance hours, or when servers are experiencing issues, please test your issue later. You can check the status of Steam's servers on. There are also other unexpected maintenance's and outages. Steam goes under routine maintenance every Tuesday at around 11:00 PM UTC. This can also cause things like unpacking and finishing the download at the end to take very long. This is an example of what it could look like.
You can spot a drive under full load by looking at your disk usage in Steam (and/or your Task Manager). This (or package scans from your AV) creates the sudden drops to 0 Kbps.
Your PC simply can't process the packages at the speed they come in so Steam will have to stop the download for some time. If your PC has a very slow CPU or drive they will bottleneck your download speed. This results in much less data to be transferred and overall quicker downloads if your hardware can handle it, but also more work for your drive and CPU. Unlike other gaming clients, Steam compresses game files for the download. This means that if you have a 10 Mbps connection you should be getting around 1.2 MB/s download rate. Many people think they should be getting a higher download speed but in fact they confuse, or do not know the difference between Megabits, aka Mbps or Mb/s and Megabytes, aka MBps or MB/s. Preamble There is a difference between Mbps and MB/s The solutions and fixes will be listed in no particular manner. This wiki page will compile all known possible fixes to download stuttering, downloads slowly decreasing in speed, your download speed on Steam being slower than everything else or general internet speed issues.Īll of the solutions and fixes here have reportedly worked for a large number of people, while at the same time some have not worked for others. Īrchived, out of date: Troubleshooting download speed issues We have created a Steam Guide that is up-to-date, expanded upon greatly and that has generally improved upon this wiki page immensely. This wiki page is outdated and no plans exist of updating it. This wiki page has been updated and improved in the form of a Steam Guide.