New "Disk Busy" preventing game downloads

[Warlord]

The beta's new "Disk Busy" indicator on the game downloads page seems to be preventing games from downloading. See, I suspect that my computer's HDD is on the out, as things take way too long to boot up and shut down. Game load times are slower than they should, and now I sometimes cannot download files. Mostly it seems to be the medium-large sized patches that Payday 2 has been putting out, but I can't seem to download more than a few megs before it freezes up.

The downloads page shows it is trying to download, but no data appears to be coming down the pipe. The indicator light is red, showing a "busy disk". When I pause the download, it instantly changes to a green light for "disk idle". I know that data must be being downloaded, as my computer's "Resource Monitor" shows the disk is working, and the culprit is "...Steam\steamapps\downloading\[NUMBER]\assets\[RANDOM HEX NUMBER].bundle".

There are at least a dozen of these, ranging from 4-7 MB/sec disk write speed and the rest standing at 500 KB/sec write or less. As I'm writing this, I see the progress bar for the 100 MB patch jump ~10% every other minute. There is no way it should be moving this slowly at all.

EDIT: Ok, from what we have discussed in this topic, it seems certain games cause this issue when updating, while others don't appear to. Supposedly it is NOT a steam issue, but just the way they update. The reason being that they download a patch file, then spend a while applying the patch to the file itself. So while the download size may be XX megabytes of data which ought to download quickly, it has to pause every little while to apply the patch. Which is why the hard drive is active yet no "downloading" progress.

The following games are reported as to show this behavior:
Payday 2 (Reported by myself)
Rome 2 (reported by Cloth Ears)
Sonic All Stars Racing (reported by V3n0urS)
Loadout (reported by Torlakhas)
DOTA 2 (reported by TheCyberTronn)
DayZ Standalone (reported by -MSolH- Zedocax)
The Secret World (reported by Luke)
Path of Exile (repoted by Brisin)
CS:GO (reported by Ashurbanipal)
Thief (reported by Nuka Cola)

[Kykymбer]

:)

[qq]

♥♥♥

[bback]

Interesting stuff that with the phone/laptop stuff. I made myself a pizza and drank a beer and the problem was gone!?!!! You all should try that if you struggle. It worked for me! Gotta be the soulution!

Seriously....I can absoulutely guarantie that the problem was not related to:
a) my network (purely Cisco based) and/or service provider/isp (I have a 100/100 Mbit fibreoptic connection and havent had downtime (as I've noticed) in 2+ years)
b) my gaming rig (including the Samsung 840 pro 512gb ssd where Steam is located)
c) my own incompetence
d) my cat

I was downloading from region Norway and that might have been the problem (it fixed itself as I wrote earlier). Of course you throw your suspicion to that new error message "disk busy" when something like this happening....That means someone has changed something.

My assumtion is that the files had to be corrupted or something. Everything is fine now (might have been that beer though).

[ShyHasFangs]

gentlemen i need help, when i try to update tf2, it says "fatal error: disc read error"
but my steam always says ''idle'' on the downloads page someone please help

[Warlord]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Balloonomancer:

gentlemen i need help, when i try to update tf2, it says "fatal error: disc read error"
but my steam always says ''idle'' on the downloads page someone please help

Do you use a custom game location for your game files? If not, try rebooting your computer.

[Hecturras]

Put Loadout on the list of games with the same problem. I don't know why Steam make this changes that ruin all the experience with the Steam Client.

[Hotchner]

^^

[ZippyGrunt]

might as well add kerbal space program to the list

[SpaceShot]

When downloaded Payday 2 update, the download stuttered... starting and stopping. The Disk Busy light going red and green. I checked process explorer. the overwhelming amount of disk access was Steam. Very minor percentages were coming from system processes. Just to be sure, I shut down a lot of stuff that runs resident like Dropbox. No change. Stuttering download. Steam would start downloading then say "omg disk is busy".

Eventually the download ended. The disk light went green permanently. Disk Access dropped to 0.

Steam's own downloading tripped the sensor. Maybe this is by design. I don't really care. I also am not here to ♥♥♥♥♥ and whine. This is hard evidence a developer can use to decide if they want to change the behavior or investigate further.

Prior to this update, Steam downloads were among the fastest on my system... lightning fast. Perhaps a coincidence.

[I NEED $]

defragment, ccleaner, combofix in safe mode and you should be fine ;)

[aaueer]

Had the same problem with Loadout, well, the problem fixed itself after 30 mins^^

[Vaios]

as Alphaa says...my problem was gone simply by waiting for it to finish its buisness.

[كيريل]

ok

[$µρΣя ЍδδЪ]

RESOLVED!!!!: (at least on my dell venue 8 Pro Tablet) I was having issues downloading TF2, it would download for 2 -15 seconds then stop because disk was busy.
I throttled my download speed to a level that my disk and Steam could handle it. For me, it was 512kb/s and i haven't seen an issue repeat. If i raised it to 1Mb/s, the disk busy error would start up again but with less down time while it recovered.

[aiusepsi]

Opprinnelig skrevet av $µρΣя ЍδδЪ:

RESOLVED!!!!: (at least on my dell venue 8 Pro Tablet) I was having issues downloading TF2, it would download for 2 -15 seconds then stop because disk was busy.
I throttled my download speed to a level that my disk and Steam could handle it. For me, it was 512kb/s and i haven't seen an issue repeat. If i raised it to 1Mb/s, the disk busy error would start up again but with less down time while it recovered.

You've misinterpreted what's going on (and my god, I am so bored of explaining this in this thread). The misconception is that Steam isn't doing anything (or at least not anything useful) while it's displaying "disk busy" which isn't true.

You get the "disk busy" light when the file I/O part of the patching process (which is more than just the I/O due to downloading, because of delta patching) is the rate-limiting step of the patch. The downloading stops because the file I/O needs to catch up.

If you artificially throttle the downloading rate, then you're making the download slower than the I/O rate, and so making downloading the rate-limiting step, which is why it goes back to "disk idle". Because the download is artificially slow, the file I/O is staying ahead of where it needs to be to avoid stalling the download.

It is actually possible you're now getting the inverse problem; the file I/O is being stalled because of the slow download. Essentially, what you've done is make the whole patching process slower just to make the indicator go back to saying "idle".

The problem with the Steam UI is that it doesn't expose the progress or rate of the file I/O, so people are drawing the wrong conclusions.