Download goes at full speeds, speed goes down to 0, then restarts to full speeds. Whats going on?

Hello,

I am having a weird problem.


Lets say I am downloading a large file, it will download at full speeds of my internet, but then after a minute or so, the speed will go down to almost 0, and then it would go back to full speeds. The same process repeats until the download is finished.

I am downloading using WIFI AC. It is not related to the WIFI dropping as when the speeds goes down to 0, I am able to still browse.

The thing is, when the speed goes down to 0, the internet is still very much active. I can browser, and run speed tests on speedtest website.

Is it the hard drive that might be causing the problem, where it is not able to store the file when downloading at fast speeds? I have a HD, and no SSD.

Or is this not related to the HDD?

Any help appreciate, I have been trying to figure this out for awhile.

 

It's not the hard drive - even the slowest 5400rpm HDD would be able to write at around 500mbps and I doubt your connection is faster than that.
Check if there is an AV activity - sometimes antivirus software will attempt to scan the partial file and depending on what AV you are running it might or might not have this effect.

Another possibility is that you are using one of the free services for downloading which have limited download speeds for free users - there are two days of doing this either you are being allowed to download at certain constant speed or you get much faster speed and then pretty much nothing for a while and then max speed again (so that the average is lowered).

 

It is not the anti virus or the server which is providing the file. As I am using speedtest direct download links for testing, which does not throttle the downloads...

 

How do you know that it's not the VA though? Just because speedtest is not throttled does not mean that the real file wouldn't be.
Also - for the sake of testing - can you confirm that this also happens when you are connected via the Ethernet cable?

 

I have tried various different downloads from different sources and same thing happens. Also this happens on Ethernet as well. That is why I figured it might not be network related and might be hard drive related?