So my house recently got fibre broadband installed, and my download speeds have gone from around 2mb/s to upwards of 50mb/s. However, ever since this, whenever I start downloading something, my PC starts to go haywire - it stutters, freezes, and even audio starts to glitch out periodically. This never happened prior to the new internet, so I'm not completely sure whats causing it.
I'm not sure if it could be a hard drive issue, this is a pic from my resource monitor while I'm downloading something:
https://i.imgur.com/02BEdpE.png
But to me those speeds seem fine? And surely you'd expect 100% utilization while downloading something.
I'm inclined to possibly cap my speeds on steam to a level where this stops, but I feel that kinda defeats the advantage of having fast internet now, so if anyone has any idea of something that might fix this, or somewhere else to look, I'd appreciate the help. Cheers!
You may want to try temporarily disabling kaspersky while downloading. For me it's usually either a case of Steam is eating up so much disk usage that anything running on the same drive can't get it's needed writes/reads in quick enough or Avast starts having a seizure about all the files being downloaded and as a result everything slows to a crawl while it tries to check in on it.
Holy shit dude, you've got a connection that can do over 700Mb/s? That would explain a lot of the performance problems. Obviously your HDD can barely keep up with those speeds, but as long as your OS, swap file and most software aren't on the same drive that you're downloading to, it shouldn't really slow down the rest of your system. Hopefully Disk 0 is an SSD that you have dedicated to those things? I can see stutters in video/music playback happening too if you're trying to play them off of the same drive that is 100% busy constantly.
Keep in mind that Steam downloads compressed data and it has to decompress it on the fly before it's written to your drive, while your AV will also intercept and check any I/O operations, that would explain the high CPU usage too.
I've noticed this on my own fibre connection. My computer's no slouch but gets brought to its knees by unpacking the compressed stuff that Steam downloads.
Even when downloading to my M.2 drive that has over 2Gbit/s transfer speeds hammers my computer, even if the disk isn't really busy.
It really is some sort of CPU or other software issue, for me whitelisting Steam and its directories in my antivirus has helped somewhat but hasn't solved it completely.
That's definitely hard drive congestion. This happened to me when I had a 100Mb/s connection against a RAID 5. You can lower the priority of the downloading process (in Task Manager) to alleviate it, but I'm not sure that sticks.
The most thorough solution is to set up a download speed limit in Steam and whatever else you use. You'll have to experiment a bit with that to find something that's stable without slowing down the downloads too much.
Yeah, so I left the downloads uncapped and disabled my AV and from what I could tell the stuttering had stopped. I think my HDD is keeping up with the speeds, in steam the max I was getting was around 50mb/s and my HDD's write speed at the time was well over that, but that could mean nothing (I'm not that well versed in stuff like this).
But yeah, for the time being I think it's the AV.
Wait, when you say 50mb/s, you actually mean 50MB/s? You gotta be precise or you'll just end up confusing people. m, M, b and B all have different meanings.
When I'd just upgraded to a 1Gb/s connection I was still on an i7 3770K, and it went on it's knees completely whenever Steam was downloading at full speed due to the previously mentioned decompression. It was to the point that I could barely even do basic tasks because the CPU was too hogged.
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