Why does a 98MB patch take hours to download?

[Nerd3d]

You might upgrade that 300 baud cradle modem and maybe get a floppy drive for the Commodore 64 update server. Those old cassette tape drives were really slow. Plus somebody has to flip the tape over and hit play every 30 minutes.
Especially since this is becomming a daily thing now.

[Kapoteeni]

Are you sure it’s not you? Took me only a few minutes to load the update.

[Mikey]

@Halk

Lol, i actually thought the updates came from steam servers.

They do.

@Nerd3d

Especially since this is becomming a daily thing now.

Yeah I think the problem may just be on your end somewhere.

[Kapoteeni]

@Halk

The cassette flipping story reminded me of the first barbarian game I’ve ever played though. Thanks for that

This wouldn’t have been Palace Software’s Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior (1987)? With a set of sword-fighting moves strongly inspired by Arnold’s Conan movies and the British Page 3 model Maria Whittaker posing in a tiny bikini on the front cover as its greatest selling point, I have many fond memories of playing this game as a young lad. One of my schoolmates figured out a move combo that was 100 % successful against AI opponents, who were otherwise surprisingly competent.

[Jens_Erik]

As Halk pointed out, the updates come from the Steam servers. We have no control over how fast (or slow) you download a patch.

[Broc]

It was really slow for me too, but was the same for other steam games that updated during the same session. I think my problem was my ISP (Virgin Media) as they are sometimes not the most gamer friendly, especially when the files are larger, until it’s in their cache.

A friend on the same connection updating later had no problems at all…

[BigDave]

Yes, the download times have always been slow for this and a couple other games for some reason. Yes, it’s a Steam issue. I’m not aware of a fix, but you can check Steam support. No it’s not just you…some people on this forum sound like a broken record with the “it’s just you” or “it’s just your computer” or “it’s just your internet connection” rubbish. That’s usually quite inaccurate and doesn’t help anything.

[DrSpaceman]

It’s usually not the download, look at the graph in ‘downloads’ when it happens. When it’s taking forever for me, it’s on ‘disk’. Setting the priority in task manager to ‘realtime’ on steam.exe helps sometimes.

But yeah it’s hiit and miss. I can download and install a new 40gb+ game on Steam in less than 10 minutes but yesterday’s ~98 meg patch took like 45 minutes to install.

It def aint my internet:

[Sisohiv]

@DrSpaceman

It’s usually not the download, look at the graph in ‘downloads’ when it happens. When it’s taking forever for me, it’s on ‘disk’. Setting the priority in task manager to ‘realtime’ on steam.exe helps sometimes.

But yeah it’s hiit and miss. I can download and install a new 40gb+ game on Steam in less than 10 minutes but yesterday’s ~98 meg patch took like 45 minutes to install.

This

12 minutes of ‘pre allocating’.
3 seconds of download,
4 minutes of Install

it’s on an SSD and my ISP is not the issue

[Nerd3d]

Well whoever the files are served from they still need to do something. If it’s Steam they can afford one of those newfangled Hard Drives … that whole update would fit one of those drives! (Playing switchin disks with 100 floppies is no fun.)

Google seems think that “Allocating Space Forever” is a common steam problem. I guess I’m lucky I never got bit by it before.

[Kapoteeni]

@Sisohiv

12 minutes of ‘pre allocating’.
3 seconds of download,
4 minutes of Install

Yeah, this sounds pretty much like what I experience with Steam, usually. The average download speed from Steam is ~10 Mbps, but all that preallocating and preparing to install takes more time than the actual download.