Steam Limiter preventing Steam downloads on Internode-SA mirror :*(

[donk...@gmail.com]

As the title suggests I can not download any data from the Adelaide Internode SA mirror (Yes I am a Internode customer)

Turning OFF Steam limiter seems to solve the problem but unknown where the data is coming from 

[donk...@gmail.com]

Not using any of the steam beta branches and im running on Windows 7 x64 ultimate

[Nigel Bree]

Something to do as an experiment is to try restarting Steam when you are in this situation. As I've found out with the new GTA: San Andreas patch and can also reproduce with Path of Exile, Valve have just started a new approach to some content where Valve are now not letting some things out onto public servers at all. For some things, this means the ISP-level proxies that steam-limiter redirects to always return errors for everything Steam asks for. You simply cannot get this stuff unmetered from a non-Valve-owned server because Valve's servers are telling the ISP-level proxies they aren't allowed it.

Once this happens, the Steam download code seems to get semi-permanently stuck; at this point, it's not even *trying* to download anything any more. It's just buggy code in Steam and there's no obvious way I can work around it. I've sometimes managed to get it unstuck by starting other downloads and cancelling them about 3-4 times, but really the only thing that reliably gets Steam unstuck is making sure there's nothing AT ALL in the download queue, Then, as long as I don't try the bugged download, I can download games just fine; but if I ever let it attempt to get the GTA: SA patch, which it can't get unmetered, no other downloads work at all after that.

Things that seem to be specifically affected have fairly new content or patches; most games - especially older ones which is what I mostly have - seem to download just fine, and I suspect you may see that.

What I can't tell from here is whether your situation is similar, or it's something more general. The first experiment to run is try some downloads with a range of things - exit from Steam completely and restart it, then try a download. If it doesn't start, make a note and make sure to quit Steam completely before trying something different to see if there's something content-specific going on, as is happening with me. That should confirm whether it's tied to anything specific, or it's truly a general problem.

I've just managed to find a second game I can't download - I was looking for a F2P title to use as a test so that we can compare downloads of the same game, and for me Path of Exile is affected by the same problem as GTA: San Andreas. Basically, the first thing Steam gets for any game is called the manifest file - every time a game is patched there's a new manifest file that describes what needs to be downloaded. For GTA: San Andreas and Path of Exile, the manifest files don't seem to be available at all from the unmetered public servers (who actually are just proxies that get them from Valve's servers, so anything that's on Valve's public servers they can get on demand).

I'll continue to look specifically at Path of Exile now I've found that is affected, but it would help if you can test a specific older game that I know isn't affected by this new wayValve seem to be handling patches; the free demo of Battlestations Pacific is something I just tried and it downloads here just fine, so if you exit Steam with nothing in your download queue, restart Steam and then download that it would be good to know if that works or not.

- Nigel