Slower than expected download speeds in Steam

[ChildishhAlbino]

On any other PC in my household - I can download steam games significantly faster than when using steam on Batocera - in the order of 5x or greater.

This was also the case when Steam was originally installed the native way. Is there any idea what could be causing slowdown when running in Conty?

[ghost]

On any other PC in my household - I can download steam games significantly faster than when using steam on Batocera - in the order of 5x or greater.

This was also the case when Steam was originally installed the native way. Is there any idea what could be causing slowdown when running in Conty?

your machine maybe? Maybe The linux driver for your particular network device. Did you try on a different one? Maybe run speed test on it in chrome.

I do know when I ran it on my Ayn Loki zero on batocera steam, it was a lot slower than my main box, but that thing is a potato in comparison.

[ChildishhAlbino]

I ran a speed test in Mozilla (installed via flatpak) and got the expected download speeds of ~1Gbps. Downloading games via Wifi on my steam deck still gets at least 10x the download speeds as steam on Batocera atm.

I don't think it's my machine or my internet.

[ghost]

I ran a speed test in Mozilla (installed via flatpak) and got the expected download speeds of ~1Gbps. Downloading games via Wifi on my steam deck still gets at least 10x the download speeds as steam on Batocera atm.

I don't think it's my machine or my internet.

You checked your download settings in steam settings...closest server, etc?

[ChildishhAlbino]

You checked your download settings in steam settings...closest server, etc?

Yeah all same as the steam deck and that works fine - my download speed caps out at a max of 50Mbps or sometimes 90Mbps for a split second but it spends the most time in the low 40's or 30's.

[ghost]

Do you have any games on epic? Wondering if heroic game launcher downloads are similar

[ghost]

and are you running off on a microSD card?

[ChildishhAlbino]

Do you have any games on epic? Wondering if heroic game launcher downloads are similar

I haven't installed Heroic and I don't have experience using it.

and are you running off on a microSD card?

Running off an m.2 SSD

[uureel]

I ran a speed test in Mozilla (installed via flatpak) and got the expected download speeds of ~1Gbps. Downloading games via Wifi on my steam deck still gets at least 10x the download speeds as steam on Batocera atm.

I don't think it's my machine or my internet.

how about in container's firefox&/chrome? (unless you meant mozilla from container's flatpak)

[ChildishhAlbino]

Ok some further findings - running a speed test in the Steam web browser also records ~1Gpbs. From what I can see this looks to be an issue with the Steam itself.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/10248 This issue details a fix by disabling HTTP2 via ~/.steam/steam/steam_dev.cfg - I can't seem to find that file from the brief searching I've done - nor can I seem to access the Steam Console tab in the container to disable it that way.

Your thoughts? Tonight I saw download speeds as high as 500 Mbps (for a short while) and as low as 1 Mbps (for a long while).

[ghost]

more reading suggests you need to create that steam_dev.cfg file in ~/.local/share/Steam/steam_dev.cfg

Some people complain about ipv6 causing issues too..sometimes my bat box loses it's ipv4 address and uses v6 which slows it down till i reboot it. Just curl -L commands take 4x-5x longer on ipv6

[ChildishhAlbino]

Ok it's quite weird. After changing that setting I can get my near 1Gbps speeds for maybe 30-60 seconds before it begins to nosedive down to 20Mbps for a moment and then it eventually climbs back to 100-200Mbps.

I haven't tried disabling IPV6 on my Batocera machine as I don't know how too 😅 I am getting better performance than I was and is still useable but it's still 2-3x slower than any other machine.

EDIT: After leaving it running on a large enough game it seems to have stabilized and worked out it can consistently download > 750Mbps which is about what I'd expect.

This is what fixed it for me.

[root@BATOCERA /userdata/system]# cat ~/.local/share/Steam/steam_dev.cfg
@nClientDownloadEnableHTTP2PlatformLinux 0
@cMaxInitialDownloadSources 15

EDIT 2: Ok It still seems to vary heavily - the above definitely fixed the issue for the most part but there is clearly something steam for linux isn't a fan of.

[uureel]

try this NET=eth0 && sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1 && sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6=1 && ifconfig $NET down && ifconfig $NET up

(or wlan0 etc) if works add it to custom.sh

[uureel]

@ChildishhAlbino can confirm the issue on my end, looks like steam borked something again with latest updates; no fix, nothing available including _dev.cfg nor any further tinkering yielded any results whatsoever here; up to valve