Steam completely kills my internet... why?

Most of you know how much I hate Steam. Great store; terrible software.

So when I DON'T have steam running, this is my internet speed:



The moment I start running steam, my internet becomes this:



When I close steam, my internet returns to normal. I tried uninstalling and re-installing steam; doesnt make a difference. I have ZERO games installed on steam right now, and Steam is not downloading anything or consuming any internet bandwidth (according to NetBalancer).

Anyone got any ideas on how to fix? God I hate Steam.

Steam tends to destroy you bandwith when it is running (Not sure why NetBalancer says it isn't consuming any bandwith??) I remember running Steam and getting angry because of the extremely slow connection speed that resulted afterwards. You could try downloading another program like Netlimiter to throttle the allocated bandwith. You could also try going into your Steam settings and lowering the download speed to something well under your max speed.. maybe that could work

That's odd, my internet speed even seems faster than usual when I use steam. What OS are you using?

Jaxel said:

Most of you know how much I hate Steam. Great store; terrible software.

So when I DON'T have steam running, this is my internet speed:

The moment I start running steam, my internet becomes this:

When I close steam, my internet returns to normal. I tried uninstalling and re-installing steam; doesnt make a difference. I have ZERO games installed on steam right now, and Steam is not downloading anything or consuming any internet bandwidth (according to NetBalancer).

Anyone got any ideas on how to fix? God I hate Steam.

Click to expand...

Same here o.O

Your American ISPs are known to shit on certain programs and hold a grudge, but I'd doubt even they would go so far as to smash your internet if you so much as used it.

My results

5/24/2014 2:25 PM GMT
18.85 Mb/s0.89 Mb/s42 msCarlisle~ 200 mi (Steam)
5/24/2014 2:24 PM GMT
18.70 Mb/s0.89 Mb/s42 msCarlisle~ 200 mi (no Steam)
5/24/2014 2:23 PM GMT
19.02 Mb/s0.89 Mb/s42 msCarlisle~ 200 mi (no Steam)
5/24/2014 2:23 PM GMT
18.12 Mb/s0.88 Mb/s42 msCarlisle~ 200 mi (Steam)

You might want to reinstall Steam and see if it does anything and search online for others with the same problem.

Normally that kind of hit would happen if your entire library decided to start updating all at once without permission. You can set that sort of thing to manual.

If it is fucking your internet without actually updating/downloading anything at all, then something more sinister is going on outside of Steam's basic programming. Could be your ISP hates steam and is giving you the middle finger, which is unlikely but possible, or you have some kind of extreme spyware or virus issue that is is sending incredible amounts of data to somebody every time you turn on steam.

What's your ISP?

Also, what OS are you using?