Jenda Posted June 17, 2011 Report Share Posted June 17, 2011 Hi. I searched this forum and found a number of threads dealing with disk overload 100%, but none of them seems to offer a real solution. My situation is thus:- the torrent I'm trying to download contains one .rar file of over 9 Gigs. I know it's a good torrent for sure, as other people have downloaded it successfully (hundreds, in fact) with no issue. However, I also know it killed both Azureus and Transmission (neither even started downloading properly). Utorrent did start downloading, and downloads at full speed only as long as it has a cache to write to (in fact, I foolishly increased the cache to 1.5 Gigs at one point and it just filled it up).- Utorrent seems unable to write to disk (internal laptop HDD) at a speed higher than cca 9.5 kB/s. My bandwith should allow up to 2.5 MB/s. As a result, I get disk overload 100% and downloading slowed to a crawl.- I am currently running utorrent in linux (server+webgui), but the problem was exactly identical when I tried in Windows. The only difference in linux is that AFAIK, I don't get to see the "Disk Overload" message in the status bar, even though I know it's there :-D- My hardware isn't older than a year and is definitely capable of faster writes, although I'm not sure I ever tried such a large file (I definitely successfully downloaded a number of DVD isos, though, many over 5 Gigs)- I tried manipulating the cache settings, but can't find any combination that works, except increasing the cache manually (override), and that only solves the problem for a short while.Does anyone know what could fix the problem, or what the problem even is? Thanks for any tips. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jenda Posted June 17, 2011 Author Report Share Posted June 17, 2011 I just found a thread which seems to deal with the exact same issue. However, the solution advised there does not help me (pre-allocate all files), even after restarting utorrent (which required a restart of the machine, since it wouldn't exit)http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=89780 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jenda Posted June 17, 2011 Author Report Share Posted June 17, 2011 Fiddling with cache settings allows me to achieve huge download speeds, but no matter what I do, Utorrent only downloads into cache, and writes to disk at around 9.6 kB/s. Is there any possible explanation for this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DreadWingKnight Posted June 17, 2011 Report Share Posted June 17, 2011 Turn preallocation off and turn on the sparse file advanced setting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoeJJohnsonII Posted June 20, 2011 Report Share Posted June 20, 2011 Turn preallocation off and turn on the sparse file advanced setting.I have been trying to get this problem solved for probably 6-8 months now. I've played with every cache setting in the options and nothing ever worked. Changing the sparse setting finally looks like I am getting some progress. I was averaging about 10KB/s write speeds to the HD, and now I am averaging about 15MB/s write speeds. I am currently stressing it to see if it has officially solved the problem, but so far I am downloading 3 large torrents and utorrent has kept up the whole time. Now its on to the curiosity part; what does the sparse file setting do? I understand what disk cache and preallocation do, but I don't have the slightest clue what sparsing does. Thanks for the help DreadWingKnight. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DreadWingKnight Posted June 20, 2011 Report Share Posted June 20, 2011 The way that preallocation works with sparse files turned off is that windows attempts to write 0s to all points in the file before/while writing data to it. In the case of torrent downloads, that ends up causing a lot of headaches because the preallocation happens at disk-crippiling speeds (as fast as the drive will allow usually).The difference between preallocation on and off is that the files only go through this process when they are first written to with preallocation turned off.What the sparse file setting does is prevent the preallocation of the disk space and instead assume zeroes where data has not been written and keep track of this in the appropriate file table. It does have the drawback of high fragmentation potential, but it does increase performance in the allocation stages, only allocating space as data is being written, and not the entire file at once. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoeJJohnsonII Posted June 20, 2011 Report Share Posted June 20, 2011 I didnt follow all of that, but I think I understand the basics of what you are saying. Thanks for the info. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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