Dude, thanks... I had this exact issue. It was connecting to that specific IPv6 address in Ukraine. After denying out to that prefix, it connected to France and started working again at the intended speed.
Just updating this thread, #12082 is related to this issue, it helped download speeds in some cases. I also ran into an issue where Project Zomboid and Garry's mod would fail to download random workshop content, turn's out just deleting .steam or any other steamcmd related folder for the user completely fixed any stalled mods failing to download
How would I go about checking where I'm connected to region-wise and ensure it's the right area?
How would I go about checking where I'm connected to region-wise and ensure it's the right area?
What I was doing was checking alive TCP connections with netstat. I checked the IPs on an IP lookup service to see who owned that IP and where it was located.
The difficulty is "spotting" the right connection but you can notice a new one popping up when you start a download for example. It's usually from a CDN.
Nothing extracted yet.
From what I understand, steamcmd attempts to use the closest datacenter by default, how it decides this is not clear. A few months ago, a few Hetzner server I own in Germany started to download workshop content very slowly (it would download 90% of the mod pretty quickly, and then stall for the last few bytes). Every other download, the connection would timeout. It got to the point where downloading 10-20 mods that were < 1MB in size would take over an hour.
I took a look into it today, and it turns out that (in my case) steamcmd attempts to peer to steam's Ukraine Kyiv datacenters, instead of the ones located in Germany. After I blocked:
My connection would max out as you'd expect. Prior to that, it would struggle to hit 1mbps and take literal hours to download (or often timeout). I suspect this is the same reason for #12291 and #6321
In the past, steam datagram relay has also had the exact same issue, with users connecting to a relay from across the other side of the world instead. There's more context here as it was for Project Zomboid: https://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/54229-steam-datagram-relay-option-for-dedicated-servers-often-causes-worse-latency-for-clients/