Slow Patch updating from steam

I play the game through steam and the last few patches have been downloading in fits and starts. They download very slow for a few seconds, then stop all together for a while, then start again very slow for a few seconds, and on and on until it eventually downloads the whole patch.

I'm currently attempting to download a 9mb file that is only about 37% done after 25 minutes. It hasn't reached a speed over 151 kbs so far. Normally through steam a file that size would download in a few seconds for me.

I haven't gotten any errors or crash logs. I've gone in and set exceptions for POE in my router and I've disabled windows firewall, but haven't seen a change.

Every single patch via steam since the launch of PoE was the same for me. It often required restarting Steam *multiple* times to get the patch to finish downloading and installing because the patch would never finish otherwise.

Often I would have kripp's stream up and get logged out of the server the same time he would during a patch. He would be back up and in game in about 2 minutes. One hour later I would still be fighting with Steam over a 5mb patch!

This is one of the reasons I finally gave up on Steam and downloaded the stand alone client.

I had this issue yesterday as well, and am currently sitting through yet another update that has stalled. Why are they even updating, there's no patch that has been released? None of my other steam games update stop and go like this. Hopefully someone will come up with a fix, be it a user, GGG, or steam themselves.

Also have this exact issue. Been wrestling with the 5.2mb patch for the last hour, still "unpacking".

Same here.. it's pretty rubbish.

Same here. And what are these patches anyway?

Same problems since launch. Hopefully this will get fixed sooner than desync.

I did not have these problems since launch.
I started playing PoE about 10 days after launch, and the first few steam patches would load just like any other patch/game on steam. Max connection download speed while downloading, instantly playable after downloading.

Now, since the 150 MB patch a few days ago, I have the problems described in the OP.

I investigated a bit further and noticed an extremely high HDD read on a certain PoE file while the patching stalls forever.

I further explained it here:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/643174

I've had this problem on Steam from the start. I've got a good connection and other games usually update with a few MB's a second....

It's especially annoying because I have the normal POE client besides the steam one, and that just flies through the updates, but I like the achievements and such too much to just use that.