Steam download throttling?

haste

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Sep 27, 2005
Messages
7,994
Curious if there is any way I can slow down Steam when d/ling. I share a 1Mb connection with another resident and can't leave downloads going during normal hours because it basically uses up all the bandwidth and slows down my neighbor....if I could throttle my downloads during the day to 25KB/sec it would leave enough pipe for my neighbor to browse the internet without much slowdown at all and it would allow me to d/l games/updates much much quicker rather than only leaving them running at night.

Any help/suggestions is greatly appreciated!
 
I believe if you change your connection type under settings, change it to the slowest one, that might trottle it. As far as setting dl speed manually, don't believe so.
 
There is no built in function to do this.

You need either throttling software on your computer or your router. Alternatively you can try enabling QoS on your router.
 
There is no built in function to do this.

You need either throttling software on your computer or your router. Alternatively you can try enabling QoS on your router.

Is there throttling software available that will limit a specific program?
 
Netlimiter (full version, not the Monitor program) works, I think it has a 30 day trial if you only need this for the duration of the sale give or take
 
enable QOS on router and get a larger pipe 1mbps is about 100Kbytes sec
 
Well baring any issues with your connection Steam does throttle its usage if there is a lot of load on the server you are connected to. Mostly at peak times.

But 1mbps connection is pretty tiny these days , if you can upgrade you'll get much better performance.
 
Well baring any issues with your connection Steam does throttle its usage if there is a lot of load on the server you are connected to. Mostly at peak times.

But 1mbps connection is pretty tiny these days , if you can upgrade you'll get much better performance.

Considering he is sharing that 1mb connection with a neighbor, I'm guessing cost is an issue... so I doubt an upgrade is a viable option.

Your best no cost bet is either through QoS, or a freeware bandwidth limiter like Traffic Shaper which SHOULD be able to limit Steam's download bandwidth (though I've never used it, so YMMV). If it was any other program I'd suggest routing it through a particularly slow overseas proxy in order to jerry-rig a bandwidth limit, but if you can't get the other two options I mentioned to work there is little chance you'll be able to get steam to play well with a proxy. :)
 
Well baring any issues with your connection Steam does throttle its usage if there is a lot of load on the server you are connected to. Mostly at peak times.

Uhhh that's not throttling, that's called Valve maxing out their pipe. The pie is only so big, more slices means smaller slices. Or, without the metaphor, less transfer rate per user.
 
Thanks for the help all. I should be able to get something figured out!
 
Download from one of their servers located in a foreign country that you doubt the network infrastructure of. For instance, you could try South Africa or the Philippines and probably not get more than 100 kb/s
 
Or you could just download from Steam overnight when your sleeping, that should fix the problem...
 
reading comprehension ftl
My reading comprehension is fine. YOU just dont want to make the change in what you do now is all. You want to download while you are at work during the day to play new games when you get home. My suggestion was for you to actually download at night when everybody is sleeping to then be able to play the game the next day or night. You dont have to play a game on first day of issue, you will live if you wait a day. Oh, and my comment was also addressed using this exact quote as a basis.

"I share a 1Mb connection with another resident and can't leave downloads going during normal hours because it basically uses up all the bandwidth and slows down my neighbor....if I could throttle my downloads during the day
 
Curious if there is any way I can slow down Steam when d/ling. I share a 1Mb connection with another resident and can't leave downloads going during normal hours because it basically uses up all the bandwidth and slows down my neighbor....if I could throttle my downloads during the day to 25KB/sec it would leave enough pipe for my neighbor to browse the internet without much slowdown at all and it would allow me to d/l games/updates much much quicker rather than only leaving them running at night.

My reading comprehension is fine. YOU just dont want to make the change in what you do now is all. You want to download while you are at work during the day to play new games when you get home. My suggestion was for you to actually download at night when everybody is sleeping to then be able to play the game the next day or night. You dont have to play a game on first day of issue, you will live if you wait a day. Oh, and my comment was also addressed using this exact quote as a basis.

"I share a 1Mb connection with another resident and can't leave downloads going during normal hours because it basically uses up all the bandwidth and slows down my neighbor....if I could throttle my downloads during the day


looks like you may have missed some of my first post as i stated i already download at nights but i would like to continue downloading through the day also just at a limited speed....
 
If this is referring to time during sales, I don't think you should even worry unless it does fully saturate your bandwidth. During the sale my average download speed has been like 300-400 kb/sec as opposed to 1.2mb/sec most other times. :mad:
 
These last few posts have been hilarious. One guy doesn't bother to read past the first line and leaves a snarky reply, and the other doesn't read at all. I love you so much internet. You entertain me :D
 
These last few posts have been hilarious. One guy doesn't bother to read past the first line and leaves a snarky reply, and the other doesn't read at all. I love you so much internet. You entertain me :D

yeah, its great if you aren't on the receiving end of the unhelpful posts. :p
 
lol @ the reading comprehension skills of TheMadHatterXxX and Comte.

Anyway, there's this program, but its not free... maybe there's an open source alternative?

http://www.netlimiter.com/featurelistnl3.php

Another option which someone mentioned on the Steam forums was to lock your download location to somewhere overseas with piece of shit internet... like Australia :p

EDIT: Seems like there's a few open source Linux apps that can do what you want, can you run steam from Linux? I've never tried. If you can you could set up a virtual box with a linux distribution to download game files then just copy/paste them to your steam installation in windows once they're complete.... sounds like a bit of an arse about way of doing it though, and it would be tricky with updates and patches. Maybe you can find a free windows program that can do it.
 
Last edited:
woo. looks like steam will be implementing this in an upcoming client update!


Another way that the new content system improves the bandwidth picture is by requiring each user to download less data. With the Steam content system that’s been in place for a few years now, if an individual file on disk were modified by a game update, your client had to download the whole file. That can be painful when the file in question is really large. The new system supports delivering only the differences between the old and new files, meaning game updates will be much smaller overall.
...
In addition, the new content system will allow us to build several new features that we’ve often heard requested. Upcoming client releases will include things like download scheduling, bandwidth throttling, and prioritizing which games get downloaded first. You’ll also be able to download an update to a game while you’re playing that game; Steam will apply the update after you exit the game.
...

http://store.steampowered.com/news/5856/


weird timing. not soon after i make a thread there is a news release that has something about download throttling in it...
 
woo. looks like steam will be implementing this in an upcoming client update!




http://store.steampowered.com/news/5856/


weird timing. not soon after i make a thread there is a news release that has something about download throttling in it...

That is amazing. I've been waiting for these sorts of features for years. Steam has always sucked balls for download and update managing.
 
I'm surprised Steam doesn't have this option. I thought for sure it had something like utorrent where you can limit your speed...
 
Change your download center location to some where not remotely near you. This also works quite nicely when big games come out and the densely populated area's are under tremendous load. for instance chicago to Minneapolis etc to do it just go open steam steam>settings>downloads+cloud
 
Back
Top