Windows 10 Delivery Optimization service downloading something and using all my bandwidth

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robincm2

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Turned on my PC for the first time in a few weeks this afternoon (I usually use a laptop) and web browsing was pretty much unusable. Incoming network traffic to the PC was maxing out my ADSL broadband.

It was the svchost process that runs all of Windows Update, BITS etc. So I stopped the BITS service but that made no difference. Then I tried stopping some of the other services that sounded "suspicious" and pretty soon found that the culprit was the Delivery Optimization service.

So what exactly was this doing and why? I've read about people claiming that it kills their upload bandwidth, but this was all download, about 9Mbps (which is all my ADSL can achieve). In the Windows Update "Advanced" settings, "Choose how updates are delivered", I have Updates from more than one place turned on, but set to PCs on my local network.

My best guess is that somehow this PC has decided that it will be the update repository for my home network, and is pulling down updates on behalf of all the other machines. Except it's not using BITS, and is making the broadband connection unusable for anything else for the duration (until I stopped it). But that is a complete guess. Who knows what it was downloading, or why...

Once I'd stopped the Delivery Optimization service (which was very slow to stop), BITS did seem to kick in and start to use some bandwidth, but only around 4-5Mbps, and so I was able to still use a web browser for other stuff, as were other people in the house.

Can somebody please explain what's going on and why - and how to stop/alter it? Why write something like BITS which seems to work pretty well to then go and use something else which seems to throw the "background" and "intelligent" options out the window (literally, ha!). I don't like to disable the DO service without knowing what it is/was up to, and why.

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