Steam Customer Support.

[sobrique]

Well, they replied quick.
But it seems nope, you can't stop Steam from sucking your internet connection dry.
How irritating.



========= Please enter your reply ABOVE this line =========

Hello,

A staff member has replied to your question:

Hello Ed,

Thank you for contacting Steam Support.

Unfortunately there is no current option available through Steam to control the bandwidth usage.

I'm sorry, but we will be unable to assist you with this issue.

Anytime you wish you can view your question online:
https://support.steampowered.com/view.php

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Comments

[ammos.livejournal.com]

Well at least they replied to you. Poor Neil bought a game after I showed him the link in your lj only to find that he wasn't told on buying it, that as hes in Germany he has to have it in German. Hes asked about this and no repsonse to date sadly.
Poor you for it eating your bandwidth.

[queex.livejournal.com]

Sure there is- configure your firewall to block it when you don't need a connection.

Or does it attempt to use it all the time steam is running?

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

You can stop it downloading, you just can't stop it eating all your bandwidth when there's a download.

[queex.livejournal.com]

Chance would be a fine thing. I struggle to get it to do anything when it says it's downloading. Takes up to five minutes to log in sometimes.

And there's the tell-tale IE 'click' in the browser interface just to let you know it's powered by Suck.

BTW

[linamishima.livejournal.com]

Steam IDs plz :D

Re: BTW

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

sobrique

Re: BTW

[queex.livejournal.com]

Umm... QueexQ, I think. I only ever used it for Portal and Sam and Max, so there's not a lot there.

Re: BTW

[linamishima.livejournal.com]

I presume that the sam & max he is talking about is the new episodic production ;)

[zaitan.livejournal.com]

I am guessing that telling it you only have 56k modem connection does not help.

If it was killing the net connection for everyone else, you could always drop your NIC down to 10Meg half-duplex. Ok, so you would not be able to play EVE for a while, but everyone else would be happier.

[darkgodfred.livejournal.com]

Override your routing to the Steam Servers, proxy through the linux box and get that to implement QoS to throttle traffic based on port.

Of course, this is somewhat overkill.

[linamishima.livejournal.com]

Actually, that's a surprisingly good idea, well suggested sir! :D

Another plus point to building a linux router/server system

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

Router QoS is something I had considered, and not just for steam. however I still think any "download clien6" should have that sort of thing built in.

[gingerboy.livejournal.com]

Some thoughts:
How many PCs do you have? Were you still working here when we did the test simulation of moving the VC server to Germany? Put a PC in the middle of two servers with bandwidth throttling routing software to simulate a slow link.

Install VMware and throttle the guest network bandwidth.

Knowing what you did with XStopper here, can't you work out how to inject a load of TCP/IP retransmit requests and so cause that TCP/IP connection to artificially slow down (reduce the transmit window size or similar?) to compensate? Or flood with ARP announcements so only 1 in 10 attempts does it manage to contact the outside world?

Install a web proxy on your machine which allows you to throttle bandwidth, and only configure Steam to use it?