Disk Overload 100% solution

[Sandbo]

I have been using utorrent for 5 years, and have been occasionally running into this issue and solving it mysteriously, today I just got it for my new system.

Spending a day I finally solved it, so I just created an account to share with anyone needing the solution hopelessly.

 

Environment: Windows 8.1 x64, 100Mbps broadband, access to >10GB files through private tracker

2 harddisks with >1TB volume each

 

Possible cause of the issue:

1. Too small cache set

Go to the bottom section on setting window to the cache setting, it starts by having only 32MB.

This may work well for most people, but not someone who have very fast internet like 100/1000Mbps.

 

Sol: Manually override the value and set it to 1000MB, this is the max safe value I have been using for years. Also uncheck the box for "Reduce memory use when not needed", otherwise the value we set would not be meaningful.

As utorrent is 32bit, a memory size too close to 2000MB actually would crash it easily, I experienced some crashes with 1200Mbps or more, but never with 1000Mbps.

 

2. Write size too small.

utorrent protects our harddrives by using memory for buffering (another reason is harddrive's small size random write is too slow).

Things we download go first to the memory, then they are moved to the location on the harddrive we set blocks of data.

The size of each block was once set to a terribly small value, which in terms limited the speed of moving data (which was too slow to keep memory empty).

 

Sol: With newer versions, this setting, located at the advance setting:

diskio.coalesce_write_size

Is now set to 2MB. Although it is mainly enough for most people, we can set it to double (4MB) to further cut the number of times we write to disk. (4MB seems to be the largest value effective).

 

3. Windows Disk Write Cache is NOT OFF

With my new computer I built recently and ran into the problem, the 2 previous solutions didn't work either.

It spent me half a day to check my harddrive for defect and tried numerous setting.

 

Someone told me to fall back to the stablest version which was 2.2.1, but I had no luck solving it.

Then I realized that in 2.2.1, the option to disable Windows Disk Write Cache was still present, though I checked the boxes, I MUST USE ADMIN PRIVILEGE to open utorrent for them to work. Guess what? It finally works for me.

 

So, Solution: Use whatever method you know to disable Windows Write Cache.

One way is to rollback to 2.2.1, then check the 2 bottom most boxes in the cache setting box and run utorrent with admin rights.

Otherwise, you can try to disable Windows Disk Write Cache on system, but in my case it didn't work.

 

PS. With admin's correct, the latest version of utorrent actually force enabled the "Disable Windows Disk Write Cache", but you just have to open utorrent with admin rights to get it working.

 

 

I hope this piece of information is useful for you and could save you some time if you are suffering from the same.

[DreadWingKnight]

Increasing the disk cache in uTorrent doesn't actually help with the disk overloaded problem.

Your disk still has problems keeping up, it just takes more pieces waiting to be written to get to the point where you see it.

coalesce write lets uTorrent burst-write in large multi-sector blocks when possible. Increasing it does have SOME effect, but it's limited.

Recommending downgrading is NOT supported and hasn't been for 8 years. Running the current version of uTorrent as administrator will have the same effect as turning off the windows cache because uTorrent now attempts to do so without a way to not do it.

[Sandbo]

Increasing the disk cache in uTorrent doesn't actually help with the disk overloaded problem.

Your disk still has problems keeping up, it just takes more pieces waiting to be written to get to the point where you see it.

coalesce write lets uTorrent burst-write in large multi-sector blocks when possible. Increasing it does have SOME effect, but it's limited.

Recommending downgrading is NOT supported and hasn't been for 8 years. Running the current version of uTorrent as administrator will have the same effect as turning off the windows cache because uTorrent now attempts to do so without a way to not do it.

Thanks for the information, I have included your last point to the post.

 

For the increase of cache size, the reason it helps is the downloading speed can be very high (50MB/s) in my case, 32MB cache is too low to be an effective buffer. 1GB can be too high, but it's just a worry free value to handle the high download burst.

With the problem I had, yes it just extended a little bit the time before it had shown the 100% overload message, as the downloaded to memory wasn't moved to disk at all.

[kilara]

I don't have a Disk Overload issue, but my issue is related to the windows disk caching that has been discused so here goes.

 

... Running the current version of uTorrent as administrator will have the same effect as turning off the windows cache because uTorrent now attempts to do so without a way to not do it.

 

This made me try the latest stable uTorrent again and see if i could use the newer builds again.

Sadly making the client run as admin does not help. My system RAM usage still keeps creeping up even if the actual utorrent.exe proces does not use more RAM or the current cache keeps stable at a certain amount.

So running as admin does not have the same effect as turning off the windows caching for me and makes the client unusable for me.

For less than 30 min of Downloading, the RAM that was released after the Download job was done was 1 290 MB! That is very bad as it slows down my PC when it starts reaching my RAM limit and starts paging.

The last build that still has the options to disable the windows disk caching is 3.1.3 build 27498 which i was using untill now and seems i will have to continue using since getting 1.2GB RAM used for a 30 min DL job is just unusable for me.

I realy hope you can adress this issue and achieve the same effect as disabling the windows caching since i realy want to use the newer versions, but sadly at the moment they are not usable for me.

 

If there are any settings or tweaks you think might help or want to know my settings, i'm open for sugestions.

[DreadWingKnight]

Disable preallocation

Enable the diskio.no_zero and diskio.sparse_files advanced settings.

Use a current version of uTorrent.

[kilara]

Those settings seem to help, but it is not perfect.I still get about 200-300MB RAM overhead fairly quick at which point it starts to stabilize(or at least increase very slowly) and then after a few min or so it drops back and the cycle starts again.So it is much better than the 1GB+ i used to get, but not as good as the older version that i used where the only RAM usage i got was write cache + read cache + client initial usage.

Still thanks for the help.

The only downside is that now the size of the torrent is not immediately taken into account when Windows calcualtes free disk space.It was nice that when adding multiple torrents i could instantly see how much space is going to be used by the new torrents and how much sapce i have left, but i keep more than enough free space so not a big problem.

There is one problem tho with the latest stable version.The UI hangs to Not Responding fairly easy.While downloading if i click between any of my other(stopped) torrents after a few clicks it freezes and hangs.Once i even had to kill the client from the Task Manager.

Again not something im doing regularly, but still its not good that it hangs.

 

PS:It seems that the situation with RAM usage did not improve for the uploading jobs.Unlike the DL jobs where after a certain time the RAM gets released with UL jobs the RAM just keeps going up.I even tried the beta which didnt help either.Sadly the new versions are still not usable for me.

I hope that some day you will be able to achieve the same effect as the options to disable Windows caching had, tho i have no idea why they were removed in the first place.