1.0.5 Load Time and HDD Thrashing Investigation

After a bit of digging around, it looks like the 150 meg patch decides to go into our Cache folder, decompress the entire game, and then take a massive proverbial dump and leave it there...a massive 4 gig

patch-base-12480.mpq

This also meant that all the other Cache-1 etc folders are now doing the same...and the game is using the HDD a lot more than before especially when firing off skills or entering a game/new areas.

I've deleted all the Cache folders for now...will monitor if they will naturally expand to the 4 gig that was there before.

Anyone else have some experience with this?

[Mahther]

I noticed the size difference but assumed it was permanent. Thanks for the tip.

Update:

The file has gone back to 2 gigs,

Also performance is a little choppy, with intermittent intervals of stuttering?

Anyone else?

[Ellay]

After the patch it seems the first 5 minutes of every game it runs super clunky caching everything. All my settings are unchanged (changed back to what they were prior to patch) and it just takes a bit before it smooths out. Overall happy with the patch but not that part of it.

It seems that:

1. Turning off Drive Indexing

OR

2. Using the unpark cores utility

Has helped with the jitter, although when things are heavy it might still choke for 5 secs...this happens on my non ISboxer computer too so at least the intermittency has improved.

[Ellay]

Trying out both of these options, will report back on how well it runs.
I tried running the game in my ram, it seemed like it helped initially but after playing for a while I reverted back to the original way.

[Ellay]

Got huge improvement by plugging in a 8 GB usb thumb drive and placing the mpq files on it. Setting up a mklink to point to that instead of the d3 folder. It runs as if its on a ssd drive. Ultimately the biggest improvement for this game is to have an SSD drive, this emulates that.

confirming above

Official forums suggest you need a 16gb usb for that purpose but you dont really need to mklink cutscene MPQ so it works with 8gb just as well.

qw