Optimize Your Downloads

[ShadowX116]

I started this 218 MB download around 6pm and then went to make dinner. I came back and it was still downloading.
It took 2 hours and 17 minutes to finish installing a 218MB update, during which I couldn't do anything else or it would slow down even more. Why?! 
Nothing else was running on my PC at the time. I have a ~10MB/s internet plan. Router was rebooted less than 12 hours prior. 
My hard drives are nowhere near full, I have 32GB RAM, and a 4GHz AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight core processor. 

This has been happening since Early Access and literally every other game I own finishes much larger updates in a matter of minutes if not seconds. 
Even Dark and Light which has a similar issue isn't anywhere near as bad as this. 
Why is it only ARK that's having this problem to this extent, and why has nobody bothered to fix it? 
My suggestion is you fix it before you add more content that will take another 8 hours to download, and only IF it doesn't glitch out and force you to start all over three times. 
I'm lookin' at you, Extinction DLC. 

[invincibleqc]

13 minutes ago, ShadowX116 said:

I started this 218 MB download around 6pm and then went to make dinner. I came back and it was still downloading.
It took 2 hours and 17 minutes to finish installing a 218MB update, during which I couldn't do anything else or it would slow down even more. Why?! 
Nothing else was running on my PC at the time. I have a ~10MB/s internet plan. Router was rebooted less than 12 hours prior. 
My hard drives are nowhere near full, I have 32GB RAM, and a 4GHz AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight core processor. 

This has been happening since Early Access and literally every other game I own finishes much larger updates in a matter of minutes if not seconds. 
Even Dark and Light which has a similar issue isn't anywhere near as bad as this. 
Why is it only ARK that's having this problem to this extent, and why has nobody bothered to fix it? 
My suggestion is you fix it before you add more content that will take another 8 hours to download, and only IF it doesn't glitch out and force you to start all over three times. 
I'm lookin' at you, Extinction DLC. 

Downloads are not handled by the game. WC pushes the updates to Steam, which is then pushing it to clients. Slow download speed is to be expected when any top games is updated because that means a lot of players are updating at the same time. Especially if you are in a high traffic zone download speed will be throttled so that their network can serves everybody. Sometimes switching your download location in your Steam settings (Steam → View → Settings → Downloads) to a region less active at the time of an update can greatly increase your speed. Clearing your download cache can also help when the downloads are having trouble.

[ShadowX116]

4 minutes ago, invincibleqc said:

Downloads are not handled by the game. WC pushes the updates to Steam, which is then pushing it to clients. Slow download speed is to be expected when any top games is updated because that means a lot of players are updating at the same time. Especially if you are in a high traffic zone download speed will be throttled so that their network can serves everybody. Sometimes switching your download location in your Steam settings (Steam → View → Settings → Downloads) to a region less active at the time of an update can greatly increase your speed. Clearing your download cache can also help when the downloads are having trouble.

I appreciate the instructions, but I have tried them several times in the past to little to no effect. 
I still fail to understand why it's only ARK having this issue this bad. It may be among the only of its kind, but it's far from the most popular game. 
As I said, the only other game that comes close to this problem is Dark and Light which borrows assets from ARK and is in the same company family.
Yet it somehow handles its downloads fine, and is better optimized overall compared to ARK. It's also no secret that ARK has never been great at optimizing.
Thus the assumption that ARK still needs a ton of work despite being a full release for 3(?) years, not including Early Access, for $60, not including DLC. 

[invincibleqc]

4 minutes ago, ShadowX116 said:

I still fail to understand why it's only ARK having this issue this bad. It may be among the only of its kind, but it's far from the most popular game. 

ARK is one of the most popular game on Steam, meaning a lot have it installed and a lot are updating and pulling the updates at the time they drops.

4 minutes ago, ShadowX116 said:

Yet it somehow handles its downloads fine, and is better optimized overall compared to ARK. It's also no secret that ARK has never been great at optimizing.

Both aren't really comparable. One had a today's peak of 351 and the other 51,149 where ~30k are playing it as we speak. If there is 1666% more players downloading an update then it will be considerably slower.

7 minutes ago, ShadowX116 said:

Thus the assumption that ARK still needs a ton of work despite being a full release for 3(?) years, not including Early Access, for $60, not including DLC. 

The game run perfectly for me and always have. Sure there are some bugs here and there but nothing major that wasn't quickly fixed. But regardless, this is irrelevant here because again, updates are handled by VALVe through Steam so there is nothing WC can do about it.

[arkark]

I've also noticed that the last updates were very slow and in my case for no reason Steam decided to use the temp downloading folder of my slowest drive. Network is not the issue, I have 600mbit and I can see spikes of about 40MB/s while installing so I assume its not a network issue.

I have ARK installed in F: which is a 1TB SSD with about 350GB free. I also have E: which is a 1TB SATA 3 HDD, very slow compaired to an SSD. 

Dont ask me why but Steam is using E:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\downloading as their temporary download folder, slowing a lot the upgrade process of ARK. I can see it in my monitoring software, when upgrade is being done and there is no network usage its because there is a lot of IO in disk.

I already asked in steam forum looking for some advice to force the SSD to be used but I didnt obtain any solution, all the suggestions were about settings that I already had setup.

This is the post I opened in steam forum when I noticed that but as I said, didnt get much help: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/2953755260402231592/