Disk overload 100%

[Nehalem]

Hello folks,

i've read a couple of threads regarding the same problem and i assume it's not been fixed?!

I got disk overload 100% on a WD hdd 7200 rpm 200GB as soon as the torrent started to pull away towards 8-9MB/s. The badwidth is around 100Mb/s. And sometimes i got the same problem in the middle of the torrent download. The things is most of the time the problem appeared at the begining, with the usual drop to almost 0 Kb BUT after that it came back to full speed.

Now i changed my rig, and got a rocket of a PC, with a quad core QX9770, nvidia 790i ultra mobo and two WD3000GLFS velociraptor (10000rpm) and two of the fastest 7200rpm hard drives available on the market (Samsung SpinPoint F1 (1TB each)).

Guess what? Disk overload at 100% at the begining of the torrent and then it calms down. What's up with this weird error?!?! What disk overload? I copyed from one HDD to andother with more than 100MB/s and utorrent is telling me it can't cope with 10MB of writing?

Please help, it's really awfull because i didn't expect this.

Is there a fix?

All the best!

Andrei D.

PS: I use the latest utorrent 1.7.7

PSS: OPlease fix this. I don't want to have a reason to swtich back to Azureus.

[GTHK]

http://www.utorrent.com/faq.php#What_does_Disk_Overload_in_the_status_bar_mean.3F µTorrent is telling you your system can't cope with the data being written.

How big are these files and how many jobs do you have running at once? What file system are you using? Is diskio.sparse_files enabled in the advanced section of your options? And why not try the 1.8 beta from the announcements board? Backup your settings in %appdata%\uTorrent first though, or create an isolated install.

[Nehalem]

Utorrent is telling me that? Well as i said i written data with 10x more speed. I even got to 110MB/s on write and utorrent can't write with 10MB/s? I don't get it.

How can't my system cope with the files written when it can cope with 10x more?

The files are from various dimensions, from DVD 4.x GB to 10GB HD files.

If youre asking how many jobs are running at once, meaning how many other active torrents...i'd say 15 but most of them neither upload nor download so it has relative no impact on bandwith, cpu or hdd. For example i used Azureus on another machine and it doesn't indeed get that high speeds utorrent EVENTUALLY does, but i handles without a flow 250+ active torrents.

I use Vista X64 obviously on NTFS.

diskio.sparse_files is disabled !!! I intentionally don't mingle too much with advanced options since i don't know what exactly mean each one of them and the appropriate sizes. Also i didn't find a proper explanation on the web for those settings. All i did found somewhat related to properly configure utorrent is to raise to 50-80 the maxhalfopen, global connections to 10.000, maximum connected peers per torrent 1000, and number of upload slots per torrent 100.

I will probably try utorrent 1.8 but i'll check first to see if it's allowed on my fav trackers.

Any other info you could provide will be trully appreciated.

Thanx

[DreadWingKnight]

Sequential data transfers are a LOT less disk intensive than random seeks, which is where most of the speed difference comes from.

raise to 50-80 the maxhalfopen

Which is NOT a good thing to. If you get incoming connections, you don't need the halfopen above 8.

[GTHK]

Checking for updated drivers or swapping out the generic windows drivers for your controllers may also help. Just be careful how you update it, Windows is kinda retarded in that regard. If Vista has something like "Last known good configuration" in an F8 boot up menu just like XP then you can use that if the update is done wrong. Check the Event Viewer before and after for controller errors (my updated controller drivers gave errors so I went back to the generics. It's too bad, it seemed to perform better...).

[Nehalem]

Should diskio.sparse_files be enabled?

GTHK i have the latest mobo drivers from EVGA. Is that enoguh?

[GTHK]

If it's brand name like Dell or something, probably not the most up to date. Anyway, it may only help. For example, on SATA my drivers (when installed) have NCQ, which is supposed to help with random disk writes. Are you pre-allocating? Maybe running less torrents would help, or tweaking the cache, though if this is from file allocation that may not help.. For 1.8, you can copy your settings.dat into the same place as it, and then it will operate as a separate profile for torrents.

I thought I remember sparse_files disables itself due to Vista lameness, or maybe that was compact, or both, if that's true then no. I thought that was for 1.8 though.. I'll probably look it up tonight if I'm not too lazy.

Oh, and are your controllers current transfer mode NOT PIO? Device manager.

[Nehalem]

No they are DMA, should they be PIO?

[pcve]

Changing half open connections in windows solved it for me..

Mine was set to 40 (default 8). With half open connections set to 20 the 'Disk overload 100%' message in utorrent is gone.

Am using EvID4226Patch223d-en.zip EventID 4226 Patcher Version 2.23d for changing the half open connections in windows. url: http://www.lvllord.de/?lang=en&url=downloads#4226patch

[moogly]

40 ? Is it not too much ?

[Ultima]

Just FYI, disk overloads have almost nothing to do with halfopen connections. A properly-configured disk cache should solve most (if not all) disk overload issues.

[sergo]

to Nehalem

these settings helped to me to solve overload problem.