Steam servers Pc#
Steam servers download#
Steam servers windows#

Steam servers download#

We don't download a lot of games from Uplay or Origin, and when we do, they still manage to fully utilize our 1Gbps internet connection.Īs time goes on, and the Steam caching proves to be stable, we might look into adding more cached services. For now, we are sticking with strictly caching Steam downloads.

Steam servers windows#

It's worth noting that the steamcache generic container provides support for a multitude of other download services, like Uplay, Origin, and even Windows Updates. The notes on the steamcache website are a good place to start if you are thinking of doing this yourself.

We aren't going to get into the minutia of configuring Docker for people who have never used it, as there are much better tutorials for that on the Internet by people who understand the process way better than we do. This means a lower access time for all HTTP requests. Running a local DNS server will provide additional speed benefits to activities such as web browsing since your computer no longer needs to make a request to an external DNS server for every possible HTTP request. This can be configured either by changing the local DNS server configuration on your computers or by changing the DNS server configuration in your router. This requires your computer sending all of it's DNS requests through to Docker container. Second, you need to be running the steamcache-dns container to redirect the DNS requests to your local server. The first is the steamcache 'generic' container, which provides a preconfigured nginx-powered HTTP proxy to intercept and store the relevant data. To accomplish this, you need to run two Docker containers. The steamcache project on Github does just this, through the use of preconfigured Docker containers. In order to be able to hijack this traffic, you need to intercept the DNS requests for Valve's CDN and point them to your local HTTP server configured for delivering the data. Simply speaking, this means, that once you know the addresses of the servers Steam uses for downloading, you can monitor the traffic coming from them, save the data to a cache file, and then when it is needed again, simply deliver the local copy instead of going out to the internet to fetch it. While you might not get the appearance of it from the Steam client, all that's happening is a bunch of HTTP requests to Valve's CDN.

The theory behind caching Steam downloads is simple. After some guidance from Wendell, we decided to tackle this project and see if it would help our specific scenario. Recently, Wendell from Level1Techs mentioned on Twitter that they were running a local Steam caching server on their network with great success. All hope was lost for fast game downloads. or was it? While downloads on our high-end systems fell to around 50-60MB/s, systems with less CPU horsepower started to see speeds fall to 20-30MB/s. Not only did storage utilization during a Steam download start to increase, but also CPU usage, pointing to a potential change in how Steam distributed their data. At some point, Steam downloads started getting slower on our same internet connection.

Unfortunately, this has ceased to remain the case. In fact, the bottleneck shifted over to storage performance, as the random writing nature of Steam thrashed our SSDs at the time.īy no stretch of the imagination is 60MB/s slow.

Steam servers Pc#

Since we download a lot of PC games at the office, it was a nice benefit to have an internet connection as fast as our NICs could handle, and that the Steam CDNs would serve us at our maximum potential.

One of the services that we found would max out our connection was Steam. While these CDNs have very fast links to the internet, they generally limit bandwidth so that there is more speed to go around to multiple people at the same time.ĭL from Steam at 101 MB/s! So fast that the SSD is having trouble keeping up. However, when you have access to a very fast internet connection, you begin to notice that the bottleneck has shifted from your connection to the servers on the other side of the content delivery networks (CDNs) that power the internet. Capable of 1Gbps download speeds and about 250Mbps upload, we were excited at the possibilities that laid ahead. Thanks to Wendell from Level1Techs for his all of his help on this project and pointing us in the right direction!Ī few years ago, we were fortunate enough to get a fiber internet connection installed at the PC Perspective office. I Have a Need, a Need for Download Speed Should you try to speed up consecutive Steam downloads with a cache server? Should you try to speed up consecutive Steam downloads with a cache server?.I Have a Need, a Need for Download Speed.