Steam DNS Caching Issues

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1

While trying to install some games on Steam I have been running into various issues with the download speeds being high initially and then dropping by 20x a couple minutes into the download.

While I am not exactly sure why this happens I do know that it’s possible to configure some Steam sided DNS caching by including the @nClientDownloadEnableHTTP2PlatformLinux 0 and @fDownloadRateImprovementToAddAnotherConnection 1.0 params in steam_dev.cfg.

However, even though these changes were automatically applied when installing Steam through pacman I still had to install dnsmasq and configure it with the following params:

listen-address=::1,127.0.0.1
cache-size=10000
conf-file=/usr/share/dnsmasq/trust-anchors.conf
dnssec

Only after applying these changes was my Steam stable enough not to drop off to an astronomically low bit rate 2 minutes into the installation.

Perhaps it has something to do with the CachyOS default DNS caching since the first steps with configuring steam_dev.cfg actually do resolve the problem when troubleshooting the exact same issue on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

2

Hi,

Yes, we are already applying these parameters for Steam as default to fix this issue. Anyways, since we do not really want to setup dnsmasq, could you check if systemd-resolvd would also fix the issue?

4

It works with systemd-resolvd perfectyly :slight_smile: steam download speed is correct now :slight_smile:
Solution:
Open the configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/resolved.conf

Add or modify the following lines in the file:

[Resolve]
DNS=::1 127.0.0.1
Cache=10000
DNSSEC=yes

Save and close the file. If you’re using nano, you can do this by pressing CTRL + X, then Y, and Enter.

Restart the systemd-resolved service to apply the changes:

sudo systemctl restart systemd-resolved

And it’s done :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

I saw that DNS configuration in systemd-resolved is not necessary.
If you want to download something from steam, restart systemd-resolved,

sudo systemctl restart systemd-resolved

obraz
obraz837×248 49.7 KB

6

Its crazy, how many DNS requests Steam does while downloading. Many people complained.

Specially, if you have a Pihole running it can get very fast over utilized.