

Part of the trouble here is that Steam internally has three progress counters (well, four, but that's not relevant right now). It really only becomes a problem when the amount of copying is significantly more than the amount of downloading. That's why download speed isn't a problem when you're just installing from scratch, there's no excessive copying to get stuck behind. You end up spending ages just waiting for those copies to happen you become bound by the speed of the file copying. Total download winds up at 20 MB, but you end up copying nearly 10 GB. When Steam's building each of those files, it'll have to download 2 MB of new chunks, and copy 998 MB of existing chunks from your existing install, per file. So, what does this have to do with your symptoms? Well, say you have ten large files, say a gigabyte each, and you change maybe 2 MB in each.
Steam download stuck at 0 install#
That has the benefit that it doesn't trash your existing install while the patching is in progress, which is good if you need to go into offline mode in a hurry, and they're almost certainly going to soon enable a feature to skip updates in progress. Once all the new modified files are built out of their chunks, they're moved over to the game's install folder.

It goes through and works out for that file which chunks it needs to download, and which it can copy over from what's already installed. It works out which files have been modified, and it allocates space for that new file. Now, when Steam finds out there's a new update been released for one of your games, it goes and grabs the manifest for it, and compares that against the manifest for what you already have installed. If there's anything entirely new, that gets uploaded as new chunks. When the developers release an update, Steam analyses the files, and works out how it can make the files out of chunks it already knows about.
Steam download stuck at 0 how to#
For each version of the game, there's a manifest that tells you how to assemble those chunks into the game's files. So every game on Steam is broken down into chunks that are approximately 1 MB in size.
