Patching/Downloading

[John]

Patching games takes forever. Downloading the patch took forever because it kept stopping then starting. I cleared the cache and I have enabled and disabled write caching on the ssd. Surprisingly I get the better performance for patching with it disabled. But I am still not getting anywhere near the max read/write that my SSD is rated for.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Originally posted by xXMurderFistXx:

Patching games takes forever. Downloading the patch took forever because it kept stopping then starting. I cleared the cache and I have enabled and disabled write caching on the ssd. Surprisingly I get the better performance for patching with it disabled. But I am still not getting anywhere near the max read/write that my SSD is rated for.

Small patches for large files.

Let it do its thing.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by xXMurderFistXx:

Patching games takes forever. Downloading the patch took forever because it kept stopping then starting. I cleared the cache and I have enabled and disabled write caching on the ssd. Surprisingly I get the better performance for patching with it disabled. But I am still not getting anywhere near the max read/write that my SSD is rated for.

Steam's patching process does this

1) reads the patch files
2) reads the original file
3) calculates the differences between the two
4) writes out the new file

It is not stopping and starting, its proceeding through these steps. Steam wont download the patch for the enxt file because you are already disk IO saturated while its patching a file.

All of these steps are the worst case scenario for drives. You will never get the 'max' thoroughput of the SSD because your drive is being taxed with non-sequential read and writes. The 'max' is always for sequential reads which again,, you'll basically never get during the patching process.

The patching process is limited by

1) your CPU
2) your disk IO
3) your anti-virus tanking disk IO

[John]

ok so why doesn't it just download everything then patch everything?

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Originally posted by xXMurderFistXx:

ok so why doesn't it just download everything then patch everything?

You want to read about it?

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading

[Satoru]

Originally posted by xXMurderFistXx:

ok so why doesn't it just download everything then patch everything?

The entire point of patching is to not download everything. For a game like Payday2 would you want to download 80GB of game data for every patch?

[John]

download all of the patch material then patch is what I mean. not the whole game each patch.