Steam features never fail to amaze me

"Ah, an appreciation post for the local transfer feature," I thought, as I continued reading to the last part of the sentence.

"Coming Soon: Steam Dick! Stream along with millions of people! Available in vastly different colors! Service opens soon!"

I see the joke, but just wanted to say that this feature was way more of a hassle than anything. I guess for the intended purpose of saving bandwidth it's nice, but it was difficult to get it to even work (steam kept wanting to download from their own servers instead of the host computer) and when it finally did, it was painfully slow, just transferring the program data manually over the network was going faster.
- Obviously not dismissing your experience, just adding my own : I tried it recently on a big game that was installed on my SO desktop, and it worked great. Just had to activate the feature on both Steam instances, restart Steam, and then I enjoyed a superfast "download" speed, that was mainly bottlenecked by my drive speed and even sometimes by my computer's ethernet port limit!
  
  I wonder if I have something set up in steam that is bottlenecking, then. I use my home network to transfer files pretty frequently so I know that's not my issue. Oh well, I don't have limited bandwidth and my Internet is pretty decent so I don't really need it anyways. Glad it works for others though!
- how did you get it to wörk?

local transfer really helped me out the other day as i tried to have a lan party at my slow-internet friend's house