What is elementclient.exe doing to my HARD DRIVE?!?!

FruityMelons - Heavens Tear
FruityMelons - Heavens Tear Posts: 74 Arc User
edited August 2011 in Support Desk
Ok,

Since last weeks update (last week, not last nights) I've noticed that when I'm in perfect world my hard drive light NEVER stops. I can hear it churning away constantly.

This weeks patch hasn't fixed this and previous to last weeks this was not an issue.

If I run resource monitor and watch the disk usage for the elementclient.exe process it's in a constant state of (mostly) reading data at about 300KB per second. Occasionally this dips down to around 250 but usually around 300.

I notice that some of the data transfer is occurring needlessly. For instance it's forever streaming audio from the disk. It's reading ambient sound data at a constant 95K per second... It's also forever streaming music from the disk even if I turn music volume to 0, which is where I normally keep it at. The largest of these files (between music and ambient noise) is 6MB... WHY aren't these files being cached in memory?!? Super poor development there.

Other than that there is constant data reading in several .PCK files... It NEVER stops. The light for my HD is practically solid red at all times while the client is running.

When I exit the client and it clears from memory my HD light flickers and I can barely detect the sound of the drive at all.

This is CLEARLY an issue with perfect.

I am running a 4 core 3Ghz processor with 4 GB 1333 RAM with perfect installed on a 7200rpm SATA drive capable of 60MB/s writes and even faster reads. Read and Write caching is turned on. My RAM is NOT full though perfect does insist on eating 600MB-1GB sometimes but I still run around 25% or more of free RAM. I run an nVidia Geforce 550 Ti with 1GB. Performance or capacity is not at issue.

This thrashing is NOT to/from my swap file. It's MOSTLY reads and ALL from perfect world files.

Once again this only occurs since LAST WEEKS update. It is a new issue. It's to the point that I do not want to leave my client running with a catshop or play for extended times just so my HD gets a break.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Post edited by FruityMelons - Heavens Tear on

Comments

  • Tiageos - Sanctuary
    Tiageos - Sanctuary Posts: 266 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    The patcher has always had a memory leak. Have you rebooted since you updated?

    Also yeah the engine was written in 2004 and barely updated since then. Whether you listen to the music or not, it's still playing it. And in a day when 128MB ram was the standard, you didn't cache it to ram.

    On a side note, I've got my shop up, I'm looking at it, and it's hardly utilizing the HD at all.
    What OS are you running?
  • FruityMelons - Heavens Tear
    FruityMelons - Heavens Tear Posts: 74 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate... and have since it came out without issues with PW.

    The thing to remember is that this is a NEW issue beginning with last weeks patch. Yes, I've rebooted several times since the issue began and it has not "fixed" itself.

    What it feels like is that the patch has turned off windows caching for it's processes. It appears now to force windows to go to disk for data instead of letting the OS cache frequently used stuff.

    Even if the client streams a 6MB file from disk the OS should pick up on this and cache it for better performance and then it would not even show up as disk activity as it shows only physical reads.
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • FruityMelons - Heavens Tear
    FruityMelons - Heavens Tear Posts: 74 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    OK, I took matters into my own hands to fix the client via the OS.

    I made two changes to my OS

    One, in the key path:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

    I changed the key

    LargeSystemCache to 1

    which enables it.

    Two, I ran

    fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2

    This now appears to force data to be cached...the music and ambient audio no longer constantly streams from disk and the HD light behavior is FAR FAR more tamed. I no longer hear the drive thrashing when the client is loaded.

    Hope this all helps someone else...
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]

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