Download Cache Cleaner = Super Slow

[DasHurz]

While it's nice to have something that optimizes the game start and run, why is it that after every update cleaning of the download cache roughly takes 5 times the time to download the update in the first place (usually 20mins+) it and bogs down the PC so hard that my machine is using around 50%+ disk performance just for the cleanup operation?

I've started playing whole other games while Warframe is performing its cleanup, or downloading pending updates on steam in the meantime, or watching some youtube videos.

It's probably not as easy as CTRL+A, DEL, ENTER, but still, it takes a loooong time. Is there some way to do it manually?

 

[Tsukinoki]

9 minutes ago, DasHurz said:

Is there some way to do it manually?

Not really.

In order to "clean up" the files it has to:
-Unpack the files
-Do whatever is need to cleanup/ptimize, and good luck determining what needs to be done.  Some of it is removal, some is combining, some might be recompiling various things, and there are undoubtedly other actions being taken.
-Repack the files so that the game can use them again

Depending on how the files are packed this can take a while as its a lot of decompression, cleanup, and then re-compression, and how long it take will largely depend on your HD speed, especially the decompression and re-compression stages.

[DasHurz]

I guess ill move warframe to my m2 then, that should at least help a bit

[Hobie-wan]

4 hours ago, DasHurz said:

While it's nice to have something that optimizes the game start and run, why is it that after every update cleaning of the download cache roughly takes 5 times the time to download the update in the first place (usually 20mins+) it and bogs down the PC so hard that my machine is using around 50%+ disk performance just for the cleanup operation?

It's working your machine hard because it's working hard. The storage is so busy because it's working the storage.

4 hours ago, DasHurz said:

I've started playing whole other games while Warframe is performing its cleanup, or downloading pending updates on steam in the meantime, or watching some youtube videos.

You're shooting yourself in the foot by making your machine more busy by making it work on something else intensive at the same time.

"Reading this book is taking me too long, let me write an email to my parents while I read it."

Moving it to faster storage will help in future, but don't do other things which will also use a fair amount of processor or storage speed at the same time. Playing another game or watching videos will be shuffling around a lot of data as well unless you're playing some 20+ year old title or something that 8/16 bit styled. I tend to go catch up on some premarily text based web page or do something completely away from my PC so it can churn uninterrupted.

 

[DasHurz]

You're not helping

[Hobie-wan]

8 hours ago, DasHurz said:

You're not helping

You're right, I'm not helping by telling you that you're making things slower and pointing out why. 😒

[SpringRocker]

16 hours ago, DasHurz said:

You're not helping

You're asking if there's a way to do it manually, because "it's taking too long".

We're basically telling you no, there's not a quicker way and when you're dividing resources it takes longer.

I really like the book and email analogy above, it's pretty accurate as to what's going on.

[DasHurz]

vor 8 Stunden schrieb Hobie-wan:

You're right, I'm not helping by telling you that you're making things slower and pointing out why. 😒

I don't think I'm not making things noticeably slower by streaming a video from a separate drive, or running a low resource indie-game when none my pc's resources (cpu/hdd/ram) are maxed out. It would already help if the cleanup used more of what my pc can support it with tbh.

Sorry, but your comment came off as unnecessarily smug to me. If that wasn't the intention thank you for trying to give an easy to understand example, but I was aware of that already.

[Shalath]

My understanding of the process (expanding on what Tsukinoki said above) is that the launcher has to extract packed file A, remove/update old versions and then pack to a new packed file B. Repeat for all of the rest, then remove all A files and replace with the new B files. My basis for thinking this is based on forum posts from those with small SSDs complaining that an additional 30+GB was needed for optimisation. I read somewhere in the recent patch notes that DE have changed something in the process to require less space so they probably now remove the old A and replace with B at the end of processing that file rather than waiting until the end (slightly more dangerous if something fails). I honestly didn't read those notes to closely though.

You can't do this manually because to do so would involve knowledge of DE's .cache and .toc file formats which would not only make modifying the game client for cheating purposes a lot easier (presumably) but it would also allow for data mining which DE absolutely do not want.

In terms of speed find your Warframe folder and try compressing it with 7-Zip. Using the very fastest compression type (which is obviously the least compressed) it tells me it is going to take around 17 minutes to do so. My copy is on an SSD and I have an i7-7700HQ/16GB RAM doing the compression. That is a very simplified example of what the launcher is having to to do to optimise the game files. DE clearly have some optimisation tricks as I think my optimisation took around 5-7 minutes or so to process after the last big update which was 2.8GB from memory.

Moving your client to your M2 will have a big effect and if you don't know this moving it is fairly simple for the vanilla launcher. Create a folder called c:\Warframe\ (or whatever other location you want). Find your EE.cfg and move everything from that folder to c:\Warframe\. Now point the installer at c:\Warframe\ and it will run through the "download" process but will realise that everything is already there and simply skip the files. Each time I transplant a game client (done it several times) I run a verify afterwards in the launcher just to be sure.

15 hours ago, DasHurz said:

It would already help if the cleanup used more of what my pc can support it with tbh

That is a much longer conversation that involves process threading and other things to do with CPU cores which I'll not go into. The image below pretty much sums it up though.