networking - Does Steam hog bandwidth or is it displaying incorrectly?

08
2014-07
  • Harvey

    I'm currently downloading a game on steam. It's painfully slow, and it's probably going to take around 9 hours.

    What I don't understand however is the fact that steam is download at around 410kbps, while I have a 3.4mbps download speed. When steam is downloading, the internet in my house is rendered basically useless. It took me ~2 minutes to load the Ask a Question page. So why, if steam is only downloading 410kbps is my internet suffering such a huge loss? Surely I should still have 3mbps to play with. Or - since steam insists on using all my internet - why am I not downloading a game at 3.4mbps? (Although I suspect this could be due to steam's servers. Though some people can download at much faster than this so why can't I)

    Stranger yet, if I download a game through origin it downloads at 700kbps-1mbps and doesn't kill my internet half as much as steam.

    Is this an issue related to steam or my internet?

    • Answers
  • Mokubai

    This sounds like a problem converting between bytes and bits to me.

    Steam download rates are specified in kilo/mega-bytes (MBps) per second while your internet speed is measured in mega-bits (Mbps) Capitalisation of the "b" is important in working out whether you are working in bits or bytes and is often left out entirely when it is important to know.

    If you have a 3.4 megabit (Mbps) connection then your download will be somewhere around 0.425 megabytes per second. (3.4 / 8 = bits to bytes conversion). In this case your internet is slow/lagging because Steam is fully saturating your connection.

    This 0.425 megabytes per second would give you a rate of 25.5 megabytes per minute, 1530 megabytes per hour. Given that your download will take 9 hours this tells me your download is of the order of 13 gigabytes, which sounds normal for a modern game.

    This also tells me that Origin either sucks, big time, or they have some pretty good compression going on. If their download speed is truly 1 mega-bit per second then they are failing at providing servers and network pipes that can handle the load. If it is 1 megabyte per second (sounds unlikely as your internet is fine) then Origin is doing some pretty good compression.

    If you do want to stop Steam from hogging your internet connection then you can go into the options (Steam -> Settings -> Downloads) and set up a limit for the download rate. Note that the speeds listed there are in kilobytes so you'll need to multiply by 8 to get an approximate speed in mbps. For example 256KBps is roughly 2048Kbps which is around 2Mbps.


    • Related Question

    networking - How to monitor bandwidth use of each device on wifi network
  • GWLlosa

    I have in my home a standard Comcast cable internet connection. I have it going from the wall to a cable modem, and from the modem to a late-series Linksys router, which provides wired and wireless networking. The vast majority of the users are wireless connections. For day-to-day tasks, this connection is fully sufficient for all my needs.

    However, on regular occassions, we have social gatherings that involve many people bringing laptops and other PCs and using the network and internet simultaneously, frequently for gaming. I have no administrative oversight over these machines; they have been known to be riddled with spyware and/or bloatware or be running torrents, legal or otherwise. The only reason I care is that on a regular basis, one of the machines will flatline my internet bandwith, and consume it all in order to upload/download/spam people/whatever. When this happens, the latency of the connections for gaming and the like becomes unacceptable, and everyone suffers.

    My question is: Is there a system I can set up whereby I can easily monitor the various systems connected to my wireless connection, see how much bandwith each one is using, and for what ends? That way, at a glance, I can spot the offending machine and kick it from the connection, without having to go from machine to machine, checking each one's "bandwith used" properties manually, and dealing with the owner's indignant protests all the while. I understand this will likely involve 3rd-party software and/or hardware; my issue is I don't even know where to begin.


    • Related Answers
  • Steiv

    Depending on the model of your Linksys router, check out DD-WRT and look into installing it. The latest versions have options to limit the number of connections, as well as view the connections of every computer on the network. From there you just find the computer with the most connections (this will most likely be the offender, especially if they have torrent software running in the background) and kick 'em.

    In addition, DD-WRT it has an easy setup for content filtering / port filtering for a group of machines. Portforward.com has a great list of the ports that almost every game uses, so you could essentially limit the users to port 80 (web) and whatever games you are running.

    Good luck!

  • soandos

    Gargoyle does the trick.

    Gargoyle is the only solution on the market that lets you monitor and set monthly bandwidth caps for every connected computer. Effortlessly identify the users abusing their network priviledges and lock them down.