I’ve had a weird issue with Steam lately.
Whenever I go to download a game on my pc, it will download fine, but I will lose internet for everything else on my network until the download is complete or I stop the download.
At first I thought this might be an issue with my ISP, but this doesn’t happen when downloading a game from my Steamdeck.
Anyone have any fixes for this?
Here is a speedtest if this helps at all: https://www.speedtest.net/result/15012239449
Have you tried limiting the download speed?
This. Link instability and packet loss is common when the link is being utilized to its max theoretical capacity, as opposed to your ISP having a soft bandwidth cap.
Cap your download speed in steam settings 20% lower than your max download speed (possibly lower) to give the link layer some breathing room.
Source: Network-dude by trade.
I tried throttling it down to 1/3 of my max and still had the same problem
I just tried various limits, and still having the same issue
I have a 500Mbps symmetrical fiber connection
Are you using your ISP’s modem/router?
Try a bufferbloat test: https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat
If this is the cause, essentially the ISP is buffering a lot of data on their side to make sure it’s ready to send to your router ASAP, but that also means that anything else being requested gets queued behind all of that Steam download data, so it takes forever for anything to load although it should eventually load.
You can also try pinging google or something while downloading, you might see the ping response times go from a few ms to seconds.
Yes, I am using the ISP provided equipment (Calix 844G-1) and also a TP-Link Gigabit switch
https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=1bbb92c6-7e60-4efb-93f5-d9f00910a5b3
Sounds like steam is saturating your connection, as the other user said, limit your download speed to somewhere below your connection speed.
The steamdeck may be fine because it had a slower wifi connection.
Network card may be giving up the ghost in an unusual way.
Rare, but it could be a nat table exhaustion. My old ‘commander’ modem would do the same thing if I opened a bittorrent client.
Try a free or trial VPN like tunnelbear to see if this is the cause. It’s probably not, but it’s one more thing you can try.
You might be onto something there, doesn’t seem to be happening when connected to a VPN
I’ve had this issue, I found it was related to my NIC and after a few minutes of downloading anything my network (on the computer, software side) would crash
I have an old ISP provided router and my wifi card is an Intel AX210 iirc… Disabling AX on the router side (and forcing it to AC) is what fixed it for me.
Ive acc had this for years, steam just seems to be a massive network hog. I think it might have something to do with a router setting, but my solution is to set my download speed cap to around 2mb/s below my internet speed (i have 8mb/s internet) and that seems to do fine.
