What can I do if my Steam client gets clogged with nearly-complete downloads?

Question

This has already happened to me several times, and I find it rather annoying. I'll be downloading some game on steam, and once a few single MBs remain do be downloaded, the download will suddenly hang, perhaps downloading a few bytes here and there.

This issue may be related to heavy load on steam's servers (recent bundles, and holidays, probably caused a load spike), so there may be nothing to do other than wait patiently.

Still, I was downloading the last few MBs of Really Big Sky for three whole days and if there's anything active I can do to work around this issue, that would be great.

Answer 1

What I do is cancel all downloads and just enable one at a time. This happened when I bought some large bundles in sales. It seems to work.

I don't know whether it is related to load, or whether something just gets borked when you have a large number of downloads at once.

Answer 2

My problem sounds similar to yours. What I do is pause all of the downloads, then I click "Play" on one of them. This usually kicks off a separate download window for that game. Usually, this will lead to a consistent and completed download.