Why is Twitch.tv such garbage for me?

I have no idea why recently I've been having such issues with streaming anything on there. My speeds are like 20mb/s down and 3.5mb/s up and I can play 1080p videos on YouTube , IGN , Gametrailers etc... but for some reason Twitch is a constant struggle. Even when I take it down to something as god awful as 360p still getting stutters.

The Chrome task manager is only reporting like 55k memory being used by twitch on average when I load it and there seems to be no extreme CPU hit either so like...what the fuck gives man? Any suggestions here? Is twitch just garbage?

My antivirus didn't like the chat and would freeze my entire browser. It was almost a year before Kaspersky fixed it. Anyways I have no problems watching twitch and have a much slower connection than you.

possibly throttling. try this?

For whatever reason nothing I watch on there is actually playing videos at the quality you pick when archived. The GB stuff is literally unwatchable garbage because of it. It seems to stream it at the super duper highest hd it offers and nothing else.

Twitch is really god damn ass backwards when it comes to how it streams videos of certain qualities and how it restricts them.

you can thank e sports for that. All these lol and co channels destroying the site...

It's CDN congestion. Twitch is trying to serve a shitload of high-quality video, their CDN has to push that out over the network, the ISPs at the other end balk at the amount of traffic coming their way and throttle the connection to Twitch's CDN. Neither the CDN nor the ISPs want to pay to upgrade the network to account for all of that traffic, so you end up with a stand-off. Inevitably, the ISPs cannot lose this stand-off, so either the service(Twitch) or the (possibly third-party?*) delivery network pays up, or the service dies a slow and miserable death. The other alternative is that ISPs allow direct connections to Twitch, but it seems like Twitch has had difficulty in getting ISPs to do that.

Apparently you can get around this issue by using a VPN.

*Twitch's CDN is maybe Level3?

It worked relatively well for me during E3. Before that it was always problematic in various ways, mostly connection related.

Yeah its weird sometimes I can get a stable 720p+ connection but if I dare close that tab then it will stutter like shit even at 360p

Twitch is always garbage for me when viewing directly on their site. But when viewing a stream that is embedded on another site, its fine.

Twitch runs poorly for me too, no matter which browser I use.

@demoskinos: Yeah, I find that if you get a good connection then you have to just leave it be and hope for the best. It's really annoying to have a twitch stream stuttering and hiccuping at 480p in one tab while you can switch to another tab and stream 1080p from another service (or multiple streams from multiple services) with no problem, it's driving me crazy.