Steam problem (archived by NightFall)

[HamsteR!]

I'm afraid that without format HDD it would be hard to fix this When you did format?

[Duka]

I bought my PC 3 months ago. I haven't even thought of a format.

[HamsteR!]

Oww, really? Hmm... Maybe to much games, apps and others shits you installed?

Try this:
http://www.dobreprogramy.pl/ComboFix,Pro...15526.html

[Sky]

I saw this rather interresting answer on steam forums : (answer #9) https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/f...818608129/

TLDR; When your download gets stuck it's because your HDD needs to finish copying files, and it's very slow in doing that, this means in all logic if you wait for it to finish copying (can take several hours) it will start downloading again and finish the download, you can easily verify if that's the issue for you by checking your disk usage in task manager when steam gets stuck at 0kb/s

I see a lot of people have had similar problems, I'm pretty sure it's because your HDD is of poor quality, I'd consider changing it

Ok. So every game on Steam is broken down into chunks that are approximately 1 MB in size. For each version of the game, there's a manifest that tells you how to assemble those chunks into the game's files.

When the developers release an update, Steam analyses the files, and works out how it can make the files out of chunks it already knows about. If there's anything entirely new, that gets uploaded as new chunks.

Now, when Steam finds out there's a new update been released for one of your games, it goes and grabs the manifest for it, and compares that against the manifest for what you already have installed. It works out which files have been modified, and it allocates space for that new file. It goes through and works out for that file which chunks it needs to download, and which it can copy over from what's already installed.

Once all the new modified files are built out of their chunks, they're moved over to the game's install folder. That has the benefit that it doesn't trash your existing install while the patching is in progress, which is good if you need to go into offline mode in a hurry, and they're almost certainly going to soon enable a feature to skip updates in progress.

So, what does this have to do with your symptoms? Well, say you have ten large files, say a gigabyte each, and you change maybe 2 MB in each. When Steam's building each of those files, it'll have to download 2 MB of new chunks, and copy 998 MB of existing chunks from your existing install, per file. Total download winds up at 20 MB, but you end up copying nearly 10 GB. You end up spending ages just waiting for those copies to happen; you become bound by the speed of the file copying.

That's why download speed isn't a problem when you're just installing from scratch, there's no excessive copying to get stuck behind. It really only becomes a problem when the amount of copying is significantly more than the amount of downloading.

Part of the trouble here is that Steam internally has three progress counters (well, four, but that's not relevant right now). One is bytes downloaded, one is bytes reused (from the existing store) and one is bytes successfully written out to the new modified files, and it only really exposes that first one in the UI, so you think that the process has stalled when it hasn't.

If you're interested, there's a file Steam/logs/content_log.txt which actually includes the count in bytes for download, reuse, and how much has been written out (which is labelled as staged). There's another one, store, which is for installs off retail disks and backups. You'll see for Rome 2 that the total amount of reuse really is around 10 GB.

What could be done to make this better is for CA to stop making small changes to lots of large files, wherever possible.

Apart from improving the UI, there's not much that can be done on the Steam end. The copying is necessary because any other algorithm would be more fiddly and error prone and lead to file fragmentation, and coalescing the downloads together into a block wouldn't help, because ultimately your total patch time is totally bound by the copy speed.

[Duka]

Thanks Sky, I understand, but what exactly should I do now?

Now I am sure something is wrong with my PC, I remember I had similar situation when Blizzard released a free Overwatch weekend.
Downloading speed was just falling to zero in few seconds, but after I stopped and started again downloading it went back to it's normal speed.
In this way I downloaded whole Overwatch, by clicking milion times play and pause buttons next to downloading bar, but it does not work with Steam.

[Sky]

Save your important files and format your disk just like Hammy said, if that doesn't help I guess you can buy a new HDD

[Duka]

Oh dear, I was hoping I will solve this without a format.

Thank you all for help, I really appreciate it

Well, let's get to work!
Thanks
Duka

[HamsteR!]

Or... before format try defrag disk or scan HDD for looking some damaged sectors and to be sure if your HDD is efficient. Good luck and write here if it help