Hello everyone,
I have posted this question already ten days ago, but apparently federation was broken so it didn’t actually reach your lemmy instance, so I am posting it again, apologies if it appears twice:
recently I noticed that my steam deck has serious connection issues, but only when downloading content (games, updates shader caches etc.)
The steam deck will download at full blast for a few seconds, then drop slowly to 0kb/s, eventually stopping with the error “content server unavailable” or “no internet connection”.
The status bar will either show a steam logo with an exclamation mark indicating it can’t reach steam, or an exclamation mark on the wifi signal indicating it can’t reach the internet at all.
When I put the steam deck into sleep mode and wake it up again, it will download a few hundred megabytes at full blast, only to stall to 0kb/s a short time later. Very rarely will it manage to download a few gigabytes at a time.
Downloading larger titles therefore requires me to regularly put the steam deck to sleep and waking it up again.
The deck never seems to lose connection when I am just gaming, only when downloading content off the CDN.
I am using a pihole, but I can not see any blocked traffic from the steam deck in the query log, in fact, all DNS requests made by the steamdeck get forwarded to and replied from the upstream DNS servers. I tried openDNS as well as Google servers, both with the same results.
I even tried disabling the pihole altogether, with the same result.
I tried disabling wifi energy management in the steam deck developer settings, but that also did not increase stability.
The Router I am using is a TP-Link Archer c7 v5 running DD-WRT (I updated to a very recent build to see if it increases stabilty, unfortunately it did not), the steam deck connects to the AP using 5Ghz wifi, I tried a few different channels but it still is very unstable.
Does anyone have any idea how I could solve this? Has anyone had a similar issue and was able to solve it?
UPDATE: For a follow up post with a fix to my issue, follow this link: https://feddit.de/post/8299615
Most download speed issues just from people downloading onto an SD card, but yours losing connection to steam servers is very weird. Can you try downloading on someone else’s wifi, or try downloading on a 2.4 Ghz network instead?
You should also try downloading in desktop mode, and if the steam Internet connection drops out, try then using a web browser for speed test/etc and see if things work.
It sounds to me like it might be a faulty wifi card, and it’s stopping working after heavy use. That’s just speculation though, and some of the tests I mentioned above will help eliminate other possibilities.
Downloading via a 2.4GHz wifi set up on the same dd-wrt router seems to be more stable, but also a lot slower.
When downloading via desktop mode, when the connection drops out, I can not access any website using the browser. It seems as if there is an issue with the wifi driver when using 5GHz wifi.
Yeah, I would guess the card is overheating or something similar. Shutdown if it gets overloaded (by downloading too much too quickly), and needs to be reset before it will work again. Probably will need to RMA to fix it