Since I have started using Fedora 43 (roughly 2 months ago). My Steam download speed has been more or less capped at 8-9 MB/s. I’ve tried many different fixes including disabling HTTP2, increasing download sources, etc, but none have worked. For reference on Windows I get roughly 20 MB/s. The only difference between the OS’ is Fedora uses a Samsung 850 Evo, and Windows uses a Samsung 970. I have ran download/speed test through other platforms and they work fine, but Steam will not. I also ran a speed test on the SSD, and it’s running full speed (~500MB/S). I am using WiFi through an Intel WiFi 6 AX210 160Mhz. Any help would be appreciated!
This noted difference may easily be due to the fact that steam is a 32 bit suite of software while the majority of linux and windows OSes are purely 64 bit. There is inherently some overhead in the translation between 64 bit & 32 bit software. (The OS is 64 bit and steam is 32 bit)
I know they’re planning on transitioning to 64 bit this year (if not this month). But I don’t recall this being an issue on Manjaro. Also if this were the case, I assume many more people would be complaining about slow download speeds other than just me.
This article on the Debian wiki suggests a possible cause:
Due to a bug in the Steam for Linux client, download speeds can slow down to several bytes a second. This happens because the client looks up the network address for all the download servers it connects to every time it makes a connection. This can mean it will request the same information ten times a second from the DNS servers your network connection is using. Depending on how that DNS server is configured, it can throttle down the amount of DNS requests you can make. This causes Steam download speeds to start fast, but then quickly slow down into nothing.
It sounds like the size of the impact depends on how the DNS server is configured.
So you might try changing DNS servers. Or the article suggests setting up dnsmasq as a local cache on Debian, but I don’t know whether a similar solution is easy on Fedora.
(I found that article from this Github issue, raised last month, so it seems like it may still be a live issue.)
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I already used the steps linked from that problem: Steam Download Speed Issue on Linux · GitHub. It improved speed by ~1MB/s (8/9 → 10), still roughly half of what it is on Windows.