I have not experienced this behavior. What distro are you using?
Kubuntu 12.04 x64. I suspect this isn't a platform-specific issue, though.
Noted in #4633, the steam client update should also try to honor reasonable download time restrictions.
Is this still relevant as of 2024?
Nothing extracted yet.
I was in a game of TF2 today, and suddenly my ping randomly shot up to like 500. I did some checking and it turned out Steam was downloading a client update. Apparently there's no way to pause this or prevent it from happening while I'm in a game. This despite the fact that Steam automatically pauses all game updates when I start a game in case that game needs the bandwidth for something.
If I understand correctly, I wouldn't even be able to use a load balancer to throttle this traffic, since the Steam client is also responsible for connecting to the game server, and it's all considered a single stream.
Not posting specs since this is a design flaw, not a bug.