Game updates take outrageous disk usage

[Erik the Red]

Ok I started having this problem with several of the las Total War Warhammer updates.

I download about 2/3 of the file and then it goes to installation - simple enough. Only it takes gigantic amount of my disk memory for "disk usage".

I am not talking few GB I literaly have 35GB ♥♥♥♥♥♥' free on that drive and it chews threw that in like 15 minutes on a 300MB update. I have to then stop the update, restart my computer so the disk usage gets freed and then continue it once I boot it back up.

This never happened before and I am especially confused since I already update this game many times before with only few GB on that drive left and had no problem. I had to uninstall Fallout 4 so it wouldn't stop the instalation after 5 minutes.

And the instalations take insanly long! Like 300MB update took me over half an hour to INSTALL, not download but install. The downloading is done in about 2 minutes than the instalation process starts hogging away on my disk memory space.

Does anybody have any idea why is this happening?

[76561198218426745]

My best guess would be that Steam is trying to put the entire game on the same area of the hard drive, probably to improve performance. Given that you only have 35 GB free, and that's how much space the game itself takes up, moving the game's files could become a time consuming process. Honestly, I would suggest clearing up some more space on your hard drive and testing the issue again.

[Erik the Red]

Originally posted by habitualaction:

My best guess would be that Steam is trying to put the entire game on the same area of the hard drive, probably to improve performance. Given that you only have 35 GB free, and that's how much space the game itself takes up, moving the game's files could become a time consuming process. Honestly, I would suggest clearing up some more space on your hard drive and testing the issue again.

I think you might be right. I have three drives C:, D: and E:. My steam folder is on D: because when it started to fill up with mods I had to move it somewhere else and all my games are on E:

Now what really confusses me is that once the update is complete (I had to wait for nearly an hour for the latest 350MB one) all that space that it chewed up and it was over 35GB of space just emptied again like it was never full.

I looked into the game folder when it was installing and found out that in the downloading folder the updates were as big as several GBs. But once the installation was complete they just shrank to few MBs in size.

I will buy a new HD for my games only soon so this won't be a problem for long but why is this happening just baffles me.

thanks for the responce

[The_Driver]

Steam handles updates poorly for the end-user. Depending on the layout of the updated content, this usually doesn't affect the user too much though.

Steam will pre-allocate new version of updated files in the /downloading/ folder aside to the /common/ directory where your games reside. Once it has fully created those files (which is done with the old data and the downloaded patch data), it will replace the old files with the new ones, freeing up the space again. A typical worst case is that you need the games full size as temporary storage, of the new size that is, so should content be added, you may need much more temporary space then the game used before. That is if all files are updated. Most games split their files somewhat cleverly and hence don't need to rewrite too much of static content (e.g. videos very rarely change with updates). Some games on the other hand are mostly a singular file, possibly multiple gigabytes in size.

Like e.g. Path of Exile, it's 99% in one file, that's 9 GB in size and is updated in (nearly) every update. This means that a typical update of 5 MB download size will result in 18 GB of writes on the disk. This is slow and takes up a bit of space. Here's a comparison with the standalone of PoE https://imgur.com/ZPgV2Sh which only writes 40 MB. So yes, patching can be done directly and with less overhead.

Other games may have layouts that allow for better splitting, e.g. when the assets are put into 1 GB sliced files, only the changed ones need to be rewritten. This also means that updates that don't change those assets, but e.g. just fix some translations in another file or so might have a very small footprint during patching, while other updates require massive amounts of temporary space.

[Halorker]

Originally posted by The_Driver:

Steam handles updates poorly for the end-user. Depending on the layout of the updated content, this usually doesn't affect the user too much though.

Steam will pre-allocate new version of updated files in the /downloading/ folder aside to the /common/ directory where your games reside. Once it has fully created those files (which is done with the old data and the downloaded patch data), it will replace the old files with the new ones, freeing up the space again. A typical worst case is that you need the games full size as temporary storage, of the new size that is, so should content be added, you may need much more temporary space then the game used before. That is if all files are updated. Most games split their files somewhat cleverly and hence don't need to rewrite too much of static content (e.g. videos very rarely change with updates). Some games on the other hand are mostly a singular file, possibly multiple gigabytes in size.

Like e.g. Path of Exile, it's 99% in one file, that's 9 GB in size and is updated in (nearly) every update. This means that a typical update of 5 MB download size will result in 18 GB of writes on the disk. This is slow and takes up a bit of space. Here's a comparison with the standalone of PoE https://imgur.com/ZPgV2Sh which only writes 40 MB. So yes, patching can be done directly and with less overhead.

Other games may have layouts that allow for better splitting, e.g. when the assets are put into 1 GB sliced files, only the changed ones need to be rewritten. This also means that updates that don't change those assets, but e.g. just fix some translations in another file or so might have a very small footprint during patching, while other updates require massive amounts of temporary space.

So what this sounds like to me is that, without doing some roundabout process or updating out of steam client, the best way to fix this is to wait for Valve to actually change the way they deliver updates?

[The_Driver]

Originally posted by Halorker:

So what this sounds like to me is that, without doing some roundabout process or updating out of steam client, the best way to fix this is to wait for Valve to actually change the way they deliver updates?

The "best" way if you want the problem to go away, even for other games.

And apparently PoE isn't even the worst offender, Deus Ex Mankind Devided seems to have updated a 15 GB file recently running into the same issues, although not quite as often... https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/340412122411454792/#c340412122412866554

The fastest way where some company changes anything, but remains within steams UX (updates being pushed through steam and so on), would probably to bite the bullet and change how the game files are layed out hence take the (ingame) performance hit associated with it.

There are other ways like just delivering a base installation through steam and have the user patch... not a good UX, it breaks with steam conventions etc.

The way of least resistance and currently most effective is to use the standalone client instead.

But... what people define as "best" may differ from person to person.

[Supah Flower Boy]

Originally posted by The_Driver:

Steam handles updates poorly for the end-user. Depending on the layout of the updated content, this usually doesn't affect the user too much though.

Steam will pre-allocate new version of updated files in the /downloading/ folder aside to the /common/ directory where your games reside. Once it has fully created those files (which is done with the old data and the downloaded patch data), it will replace the old files with the new ones, freeing up the space again. A typical worst case is that you need the games full size as temporary storage, of the new size that is, so should content be added, you may need much more temporary space then the game used before. That is if all files are updated. Most games split their files somewhat cleverly and hence don't need to rewrite too much of static content (e.g. videos very rarely change with updates). Some games on the other hand are mostly a singular file, possibly multiple gigabytes in size.

Like e.g. Path of Exile, it's 99% in one file, that's 9 GB in size and is updated in (nearly) every update. This means that a typical update of 5 MB download size will result in 18 GB of writes on the disk. This is slow and takes up a bit of space. Here's a comparison with the standalone of PoE https://imgur.com/ZPgV2Sh which only writes 40 MB. So yes, patching can be done directly and with less overhead.

Other games may have layouts that allow for better splitting, e.g. when the assets are put into 1 GB sliced files, only the changed ones need to be rewritten. This also means that updates that don't change those assets, but e.g. just fix some translations in another file or so might have a very small footprint during patching, while other updates require massive amounts of temporary space.

I checked my /downloading/ folder and it had a 3.5gb file from an old update, bumping my storage to enough to be able to update the game. Thank you and I hope this helps anyone in a similar position.

[Vitya, nem vita]

I'm sorry to beat a dead thread here, but it seems Volvo's ways hasn't changed. Oxygen Not Included updated 5MBs worth of content today with an overall installation size of 3.5GBs, truly infuriating. Outrageous Update Size Haters and SSSDD (Small Solid State Drive Disorder) patients rise up.

[darsain]

Same thing Apex Legends. There's a small <100MB update, and the whole 70GB game needs to reallocate. I literally can't apply a 100MB patch because I only have 50GB free space atm. Not to mention how this hammers everyone's SSD.
This is ridiculous. The only solution is to delete the whole game, and re-download the newest version.
Don't have a patience for this. I guess I'm just not gonna play Apex anymore.

[Bloodfeeder0511]

Yep.

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by darsain:

Same thing Apex Legends. There's a small <100MB update, and the whole 70GB game needs to reallocate. I literally can't apply a 100MB patch because I only have 50GB free space atm. Not to mention how this hammers everyone's SSD.
This is ridiculous. The only solution is to delete the whole game, and re-download the newest version.
Don't have a patience for this. I guess I'm just not gonna play Apex anymore.

That's because you need to understand how Steam works.

Steam does work a little differently to most other places. Two major things to remember are that Staem doesn't like it when you go OVER 90% usage of your drive space. You also need to allow up to THREE TIMES the total file size for whatever you're downloading (as games are encrypted AND compressed).

Many fall foul of this and run disk space up to the hilt, so they then complain.

And it sounds like you're doing similarly. It WILL give you issues.

Just to be clear you should run things like this - if you have say, a 1TB hard drive, and you've used 800GB then that's 80% and you have about 100GB left to play with. If you then try to download an 80GB game, you won't have enough space (as you need to allow up to THREE times that size).

Similarly this applies to updates too. Games might have a relatively small update but depending on how they are coded, depends on WHAT they update. If they change a single variable that is used globally across the whole game, then yup, GIGABYTES need to be patched obviously as all that data needs changing.

You cannot escape that.

[Niblix]

Having issues patching games here too. Downloads take very little time but the patching and verifying is taking a very long time.

All games on SSD and this seems to have only started happening in the last 2 weeks for me.

[Elucidator]

Either you download a patch, then patch the game
or you download the patched game.

As for disk usage, that meter is just vague information steam displays to let you know it maybe busy.

tip: use resource monitor, task manager or even better.. resource explorer.
then you can see way better at what is going on, is it reading, is it writing, etc.

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by Niblix:

Having issues patching games here too. Downloads take very little time but the patching and verifying is taking a very long time.

All games on SSD and this seems to have only started happening in the last 2 weeks for me.

Make sure you are avoiding the usual issues like going over 90% space usage on your drive otherwise that WILL slow things down.

[Silicon Vampire]

I can’t see how digging up a nearly 6 year old thread can be helpful to anyone. The client has changed several times and had numerous updates changing how it works over the years.