1450
When Baldur's Gate 3 came out, Steam's overall bandwidth consumption went from around 18 Tbps to 146 Tbps
(reddthat.com)
From Steam's self-published stats.
Baldur's Gate 3 could not be preloaded and weighed in at 125 gigabytes on disk, so when the game left Early Access at 11am US Eastern yesterday, Steam's bandwidth utilization shot up 8x over a span of 30 minutes. I know personally, I saw my download hit over 600 Mbps across a 1 Gbps fiber connection.
Kudos to the system engineers at Valve. It is mind-boggling that they have built infrastructure that robust.
Steam would profit from integrating something like the bittorrent protocol for downloads imo
it is already partially implemented for local network transfers.
They do have such system, but only works for clients in the same lan.
I've often wondered if this works if you use a VPN or not?
Blizzard's Downloader used torrents.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be-surprised/
Thank you and please not. I value my upload for myself. At best make it an opt-in!
It's typically a soft switch in the config for capable clients.
Off the top of my head, I know Windows Update and the Battle.net launcher both do this
And on Windows it's so poorly implemented they had to reserve 20% of bandwidth for updates being uploaded and downloaded and you don't get a choice on that. So when Windows is sharing its updates your internet access suffers.
Jokes on windows, my WiFi is just funky enough that transfers between devices on LAN run like dogshit so it gives up before it even starts!
...I really need to invest the time into finding & implementing a better network solution
Go with old 10BASE2 network topology. Nothing beats 1Mbps which might randomly stop working due to missing terminator somewhere in the network.
Do you have any source or article about this? I'd love to hear more about this.
Microsoft's implementation of the feature is called Windows Update Delivery Optimization.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-update-delivery-optimization-and-privacy-bf86a244-8f26-a3c7-a137-a43bfbe688e8
Here's a short optimisation guide: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-delivery-optimization.html
Fundamentally it's not like the Bittorrent protocol, even though there are similar behaviours and the result is the same. Microsoft retains the ability to stop the network from seeding updates and has ways of only targeting specific supported configurations to receive new updates.