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)

[Ampulex]

just reiterating everyone else's confusion and frustration. 15 min download that was actually about 40 seconds of actual downloading. Sort it out please.

[Shierke]

This happens all the time for my Left for Dead 2 workshop content, quite frustrating.

[Mana]

Happens for me with any game that has very large patches (multiple gigabytes), update permapauses in disk busy even though there's only 1-7MB/s activity which isn't the kind that requires pausing. The only option to get past this seems to be to shut down or pause biggest disk using apps in the background (for example Chrome likes to trash disk a lot for some obscure reason they haven't been able to figure out). And even that is unreliable, it's like it's detecting its own activity as a reason to think the disk is busy and pauses for a while for even that.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Happening to me too, but I am backlogged on updates, but from what I am seeing (you can check my games listing for what I own) but so far updates for CS:GO and PAYDAY2 are the worst.

Small updates take forever (I am on 105Mb Cable), yet I downloaded AC4 full game from Steam in about 15mins.

Whenever the above 2 games I mentioned (that I can think of off-hand) do anything related to updates, I get very small updated increment of data downloading, then Disk Busy turns red in Steam and the update simply halts. Like others said, it is ridiculous because most updates are fairly small and on a solid/fast connection would take a few secs at best if it would not chug. What these games do for some reason. And none of my Steam games are on my OS SSD drive, but on a WD Black 2TB, which is very fast, so it's not like it has trouble getting flooding with reads/writes and such.

One of my other setups I use for the kids has CSGO and PAYDAY2 on the OS drive and it does the same things. It is obviously a Steam Client / Server related issue for most part. Cause how is it I can update other game titles, or download entire games at the speed of light, yet some games as these make my system come to a halt for most part.

I tried quickly going to Library > Downloads and click Pause All and then just make a game like PAYDAY2 start downloading (jump to top of queue) and it hasn't helped one bit.

[Babo]

It's happening to me with the current 1.7GB update of Payday 2. I had 20 GB of free space in my HDD, when I started download this "1.7 GB" update, my HDD became full immediately so I had to remove Bulletstorm, now I have 3.77GB free, I'm still downloading the update, the downloading freezes every few second with Disk Busy, my pc becomes super slow :( But i read op's post and hopefully everything will go back to normal after this downloading is completed.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Never did this crap before Steam added this feature, if u can even call it that.
Now I cringe and cross-fingers when I see game updates on Steam.

I have tons of free space, high performance drives, using fairly decent hardware with AHCI - SATA3. SSD for OS, WD Blue 1TB and Black 2TB for Games; this should not be happening.

Sure I could see system slowing issues and the client hogging major resources and such when u only dealing with OS + Games on a single HDD perhaps. But for me or setups like what I described there is no way it should be doing it. And it is not ALL of my games, only a few. I even reinstalled from scratch and verified game cache, no change.

[Mandarinka]

Харош на бургском балакать, объясните по человечески как с этим справиться?

[Babo]

My Payday 2 update has finished. Now I have 27 GB free (20GB before update, full when downloading starts, 3GB free when I remove Bulletstorm). So it seems that this 1.7GB update for Payday 2 prelocated 20GB of my HDD space, and the update was downloading and extracting+patching files at the same time, that's why the HDD was busy and system got slow. I think the only way to deal with games that have this type of update progress is to update only when you're not doing anything else with your PC. That or tell Steam and the devs to stop compressing their files, which will make the update files much bigger and take longer to download.

[Zekko]

Just wanted to say THANK YOU to the OP for summarizing! I was looking all over for the culprit of this strange 100% disk use issue fearing it was a problem with my PC or OS. It sucks that PAYDAY 2 and other games download in such a weird way, but I'm relieved it's not something inherent to my PC :D thank you!!

[Lichfreeze]

Publicado originalmente por 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)

[Lichfreeze]

ok here is the thingturn off skype Razzer comms or any program for comunication ts etc..evrything thath waste rams and voila its fixed worked for me

[Warlord]

Yeah, that isn't the issue. I am not using any communication software such as TS, Vent, or Mumbles or Skype. I have 12 GB of ram, 10 GB of which are available, and this still happens. As we said, it is just poor optimization of files.

For example, the payday 2 update spent a lot of time at about 56 MB out of 1700 MB downloaded. My hard drive was constantly working, but no more data came down. Then it stuttered a bit, downloading some then stopping. Then, after I left it for about 10 minutes, I look back and it is at full speed, half-done, with no stops.

Just let it run, it WILL finish. Restarting steam does NOTHING. Do NOT attempt that.

[Ebonwind]

Apparently I should have just reinstalled the game from scratch. I showed my coworkers the game and they all installed it today (from scratch, no 'disk busy') but my patch is still stuttering along even after they have downloaded the entire 20+ GB.

[mazuchi]

Yeah i just bought payday 2 and a few DLC for it and it's never done it with any other game except this. Also, no other programme is running except steam and it's not downloading ? :S

Publicado originalmente por Warlord:

I seem to recall that something in the patch that added it indicated when the disk would be too "busy" for downloading a game patch. It appeared to indicate that if the disk is already busy doing something else (like a defragment or w/e) that it would pause the download so as to not further put any load on the disk.

I do notice this problem always seems to occour on Payday patches, and I know that whenever they patch it doesn't end with that many "new" assets on the disk, but rather than it has to download that much data, but is likely simply replacing data already on the disk and the net result is much less than the download.

However, since that game is the only one that does this kind of work, the steam downloads page only shows a hung download, and to the user it indicates nothing is happening. Basically, they need to also show when a download is "working" on the hard drive and not ready yet for more files to be downloaded. When steam is processing local files, there should be an indicator.

[Hustlanen]

I am having this problem atleast when downloading Deus Ex - Human Revolution, haven't tried any other big downloads yet. Steam shows disk is busy and the download stops. The big problem is that when this happens, steam crashes, so i can never finish the download.