Its currently the christmas sale on steam so the world and his brother are downloading games that are in the sale because they are so cheap.

For most of the year the steam servers are underpopulated, but during the sales (christmas and summer) they reach the upper limits of what they can hold and slow everyone down.

I usually download at 1mb/s how ever recently it has dropped as low as 16 BYTES/sec and then it would stop every so often. I looked over the internet and could only find whines about this with no real help so I decided to think of an idea. Someone directed me to store.steampowered.com/stats/content/ which shows how full the servers and which ones are empety/low population.

In steam you can change your download region. So find a country in the list that has a low amount of people on it and remember the country.

How to change download location:

1) In steam in the top left it says Steam, click this.
2) Then in the list that drops down click settings.
3) Navigate to the download+cloud tab.
4) Change your download region to the low population one you chose above. It is a box with a drop down arrow.
5) Finally restart steam and the download will carry on from where it left off at a higher speed. I went from 16bytes/sec-100kb/sec to 512kb/s. This wont be your usual full speed but it should be faster and will stop the random drop outs mid download.


Hope this helps

Fraag <3