Improve pre-allocating disk space

[wudicgi]

When the "pre-allocate all files" is enabled, if I select more files in a task which has already started, µTorrent will always allocates the disk space for the selected files whenever the task is running.

I often add several torrents at a time, and change the selected files after the task is started. At this time, µTorrent will allocate the disk space immediately. But I just want to select these files for downloading them at a later date. (All the files downloaded by P2P software were save in a separate partition labeled "Cache", so the disk space is not enough to put all the files.) I think it is better that the disk space is only allocated when the task is running.

--

I'm not native English speaker.

[Ultima]

Hm, can you reword what you wrote? You said that the current behavior is better than... the current behavior ;o

[NiGHTsC]

He means that uTorrent will allocate the files that you want as soon as you selected in "Files" and he's asking if uTorrent can only allocate these files when it's downloading and not immediately.

Also, I found that Pre-Allocate will allocate even the files that you don't want to download, IE. 4 files in a torrent and you select only 1 to download, but Pre-Allocate will allocate all the rest and not only the 1 you downloading, is it a bug?

[Ultima]

If you don't have "Pre-allocate all files" checked in Preferences > General, then µTorrent only allocates a full file once it actually downloads a piece that belongs to the file. If it allocates immediately after you unskip the file, then it must've already downloaded some of the data for the file into the partfile before you unskipped it.

[arcuser]

Surely pre-allocation can work better than this though...

On some other Torrent clients I previously used (mentioning no names) pre-allocation worked exactly as it should have, even if a file was large, it only allocated it by every byte that it wrote to the disk.

Surely uTorrent could manage this also?

[Ultima]

It already can do that (diskio.sparse_files). That's not considered pre-allocation at all, and so is irrelevant.

[arcuser]

I know about that Ultima, as well as everyone else does. But thats only on NTFS.

On the other programs it was available as standard (without tweaking any features) in FAT32 systems as well.

[Ultima]

Wrong, not everyone else knows -- I would know this due to the very fact that I've seen too many posts where people ask about allocation issues. Additionally, your previous post gave no indication that you knew this feature even existed. Honestly, with that last line in your previous post, it would appear you were requesting for µTorrent to be able to do this -- hence my "irrelevant" comment.

Anyhow, writing in that method can cause heavy fragmentation, and truthfully, I can hardly see any benefits. As such, I don't understand why it should be the default allocation behavior. Support for writing in that method for any filesystem did come in the form of bt.compact_allocation, but it's currently broken and shouldn't be used.

So yeah, the feature is already there (albeit half-broken). What you really should be asking if you knew? When/if it will be fixed. Unfortunately, that's something I don't know the answer to.

[arcuser]

I think you misread what I said, or else I wrong it wrongly.

I meant "I know about that Ultima, JUST as well as everyone else does. But thats only on NTFS."

I meant I know about that just like the next person... but anyhow that's not the issue.

I would really appreciate a method that can handle it on any filesystem, including FAT32.

I personally couldn't care less about fragmentation issues, that shouldn't be uTorrent's dealings anyway - if it deals with it not, if not I don't expect it to.

So yes, the question really is when/if it will be fixed, including for FAT32.