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Cache optimization- what about SSD users?


Cathair
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I run Warframe on my SSD. It doesn't need to be defragged. I don't want it to be defragged, because as any SSD owner should know, all that does is eat write cycles from the finite lifespan of the drive. Come on, guys, you're developers; you know should know how an SSD works in 2017. Or did no one ever think that people would be running this game on an SSD, when SSDs have been extremely common in gaming PCs for at least half a decade?

 

Hey, I know it's not the end of the world, the amount of wear this one update will add to my drive isn't much compared to years of regular use. But still, I don't shuffle games around on my SSD that often, so if you intend to do this every time Warframe updates, that's putting several times more wear on my SSD than I would've done on my own over the same period of time.

 

Again, I'm not freaking out over a few lost write cycles, but c'mon, you're literally damaging my hardware for no reason. Cut it out.

Edited by Cathair
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SSD had issues when they were 1st introduced, the life cycles for them have greatly increased, it doesn't really matte if the launcher forced them to defrag or not, because in the end it won't matter, they are expected to last far more years than any component in your system.

Edited by KIREEK
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34 minutes ago, Cathair said:

I run Warframe on my SSD. It doesn't need to be defragged. I don't want it to be defragged, because as any SSD owner should know, all that does is eat write cycles from the finite lifespan of the drive. Come on, guys, you're developers; you know should know how an SSD works in 2017. Or did no one ever think that people would be running this game on an SSD, when SSDs have been extremely common in gaming PCs for at least half a decade?

Not that i can't say it didn't defrag (i run Warframe off an SSD too and payed it no mind), but i don't think the optimization process is strictly a defrag one.

Similar to the Verify process, i seem to recall a dev at one point stating that the optimization pass goes through your files and instead deletes junk that warframe has accrued over 'X' many updates, instead of re-downloading broken/corrupt files as in the case of the 'Verify' pass.

I don't know if it actually notices an SSD, but you assume it would since it is listed in the EE.log, and subsequently skips the defrag. My optimize pass took ~5mins, where as others seemingly have had it running for 10-30mins.

This is why it gets run every now and then - i think the last one was after the earth remaster?

Edited by MillbrookWest
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24 minutes ago, ViolettaFoxx said:

It's not a defragment protocol that was ran.

Say what? The process of optimization in this case involves moving the game's data on disk to sectors that are physically closer together, preferably contiguous if possible, which allows the hard disk to read them faster (because its reader doesn't have to jump around), and frees up little bits of space that may have been too small to use, stuck between blocks of recorded data. That's what defragmenting is.

 

What do you think it was doing, if not defragmenting? How do you think this mysterious "optimization" provides faster load times and reduces wasted space, then?

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Optimizing in Warframe only Defrags if it is a Hard Disk. it's doing much more than that regardless of storage type. such as deleting unnecessary left over data, and ensuring the file index aligns with the stored data.
Optimizing targets Defragging for applicable Disk types, but mostly exists to ensure loading, spot loading, and size on disk is kept in order.

 

so no - you're wrong.
Warframe is not burning your Hardware. the process was even renamed from Defrag to Optimize a long time ago because it confused SSD owners into thinking it was something it wasn't. of being just a Defrag process - as it is much more than that, Defragging is only a small part of why it exists.

4 minutes ago, Cathair said:

How do you think this mysterious "optimization" provides faster load times and reduces wasted space, then?

Warframe has a Filesystem, there is an index of data locations. data being continuous on the Disk only matters for Hard Disks since they have relevant Seek Times. indexing the data is what makes it fast, because you already know where it is located, you do not need to seek for it.

Edited by taiiat
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32 minutes ago, KIREEK said:

SSD had issues when they were 1st introduced, the life cycles for them have greatly increased, it doesn't really matte if the launcher forced them to defrag or not, because in the end it wo't matter, they are expected to last far more years than any component in your system.

That is due to wear leveling which tries to even out the finite writes that the SSD sector equivalents can accept. One can easily burn out a SSD by performing HDD utilities on SSD for instance or writing to them constantly in a short period of time. That is why a SSD has its peek performance at first use and used along dedicated SSD tools like TRIM instead of Defrags, and writing only the files that need to be installed can allow a SSD to outlast HDD, though this is still quite rare.

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53 minutes ago, KIREEK said:

SSD had issues when they were 1st introduced, the life cycles for them have greatly increased, it doesn't really matte if the launcher forced them to defrag or not, because in the end it wo't matter, they are expected to last far more years than any component in your system.

Irrelevant. Like I said in the OP, I'm aware that it's not going to cause serious damage, but that doesn't change the fact that it's doing something that causes harm for absolutely no benefit.

It's kind of like various games in the past that have had framerate bugs in menus threatening to overheat people's GPUs. Is it critical? Nah, you can work around it and it won't break anything right away. Is it a problem that should be fixed? Yes.

 

27 minutes ago, MillbrookWest said:

Not that i can't say it didn't defrag (i run Warframe off an SSD too and payed it no mind), but i don't think the optimization process is strictly a defrag one.

Similar to the Verify process, i seem to recall a dev at one point stating that the optimization pass goes through your files and instead deletes junk that warframe has accrued over 'X' many updates, instead of re-downloading broken/corrupt files as in the case of the 'Verify' pass.

I don't know if it actually notices an SSD, but you assume it would since it is listed in the EE.log, and subsequently skips the defrag. My optimize pass took ~5mins, where as others seemingly have had it running for 10-30mins.

This is why it gets run every now and then - i think the last one was after the earth remaster?

Hmm, now that would explain some things. I can't find explicit reference to this in my EE.log, though. Would be nice to get some concrete information on this from the devs.

I mean, hopefully it would be smart enough skip the defrag pass on SSDs (not that it should be doing something that invasive in the first place as part of a mandatory update, regardless of hardware). I've got nothing to go on here, though, except a lot of heavy disk usage during its optimization process.

Edited by Cathair
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17 hours ago, taiiat said:

Optimizing in Warframe only Defrags if it is a Hard Disk. it's doing much more than that regardless of storage type. such as deleting unnecessary left over data, and ensuring the file index aligns with the stored data.
Optimizing targets Defragging for applicable Disk types, but mostly exists to ensure loading, spot loading, and size on disk is kept in order.

 

so no - you're wrong.
Warframe is not burning your Hardware. the process was even renamed from Defrag to Optimize a long time ago because it confused SSD owners into thinking it was something it wasn't. of being just a Defrag process - as it is much more than that, Defragging is only a small part of why it exists.

Warframe has a Filesystem, there is an index of data locations. data being continuous on the Disk only matters for Hard Disks since they have relevant Seek Times. indexing the data is what makes it fast, because you already know where it is located, you do not need to seek for it.

 

...thank you

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17 hours ago, taiiat said:

Optimizing in Warframe only Defrags if it is a Hard Disk.

False. It doesn't defrag anything on any storage medium at all. What it does is rebuild the cache files by dropping no longer used data therein. Imagine a file containing [good data|no longer used data|good data] -> new file will be [good data|good data] only. It does that no matter where you store it on. Whether the new file will be defragmented on your storage medium is none of the optimization process's concern.

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1 hour ago, Snib said:

False.

no, it is correct. Defragmentation is part of the tools it has available to it. if you go back and read more closely, note the part where i mentioned that Optimize used to be called Defrag. Defragmentation is part of the featureset presented by the button, but it does much more than that.

for Hard Disks, Defragmenting the data it is messing with is actually mission critical. just cutting holes in files wildly increases the Seek Times for them as it will lose the data it's reading and have to go find it again.
any time you cut holes in data, you want to push it back together. the fundamental purpose of Degragmenting...

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@taiiat I know I'm right, you think you are right, we probably won't solve this here. But maybe this is food for thought, I just ran the optimization manually and this is how it looks for me now on my HDD:

ZnqbAtI.png

But as I said, we don't have to solve this here, I know this is no proof of anything.

Edited by Snib
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your complaining that u chose to use a medium that has lower life span, and will end up being replaced anyways when u build a new system :3 i love you guys soo much LMFAO

if u planned to use the system for more then 4 years, then you should have gotten a normal hdd, and slapped the game on it, and only installed the operating system and drivers onto the ssd like a normal person instead of installing a program that gets constant updates to a device with finite writes 

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When you get an SSD Thats older than 3 years expect it to die a lot sooner than you expect

SSD's were meant to be quick and efficent used only when needed not a complete replacement for HDDs thats why HDDs are still used to this day

Besides if you dont have an HDD over 1-2TB in your computer anyway youre building your PC wrong

besides you'll be replacing that SDD when u build a new PC anyway 

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Unless you bought a sub-standard SSD or just an old one then it's usually going to last much longer than 3 years. Some can last upwards of 10+ years given average file use and you keep adequate free space (if they don't have auto provisioning).

Some posters should really get up to date on NAND flash memory. TLC V-NAND is particularly strong in life expectancy. For any decent SSD you're looking at around 150GB of writes per day to drop it's life expectancy under 4 years and that's for a lower capacity 120GB drive. Indeed SSD have no less a life expectancy than a HDD.

This isn't specific to OP, they have reason to care about something potentially defraging an SSD though the wear as they said is minimal and not much different than an update patch. This is mostly for the incorrect assumptions of modern SSDs.

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8 hours ago, Snib said:

@taiiat I know I'm right, you think you are right, we probably won't solve this here. But maybe this is food for thought, I just ran the optimization manually and this is how it looks for me now on my HDD:

ZnqbAtI.png

But as I said, we don't have to solve this here, I know this is no proof of anything.

There's your problem right there.  You're using the Steam Client.  ***just messing with you a little bit**

But I would honestly say that having Steam in the way more than likely isn't as efficient as the Stand-alone DE Client.  :D

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28 minutes ago, DatDarkOne said:

But I would honestly say that having Steam in the way more than likely isn't as efficient as the Stand-alone DE Client.  :D

There's no difference, the clients are identical and you can run the Steam "version" without Steam. More importantly, Steam doesn't handle the downloads, the launcher does.

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21 minutes ago, Snib said:

There's no difference, the clients are identical and you can run the Steam "version" without Steam. More importantly, Steam doesn't handle the downloads, the launcher does.

You would think that, but they are slightly different.  I have both installed right now.  The Steam version has more overhead and other things that I just prefer not to have in my gaming experience.  I'm a little old skool that way.  :D

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1 hour ago, Xzorn said:

Unless you bought a sub-standard SSD or just an old one then it's usually going to last much longer than 3 years. Some can last upwards of 10+ years given average file use and you keep adequate free space (if they don't have auto provisioning).

Some posters should really get up to date on NAND flash memory. TLC V-NAND is particularly strong in life expectancy. For any decent SSD you're looking at around 150GB of writes per day to drop it's life expectancy under 4 years and that's for a lower capacity 120GB drive. Indeed SSD have no less a life expectancy than a HDD.

This isn't specific to OP, they have reason to care about something potentially defraging an SSD though the wear as they said is minimal and not much different than an update patch. This is mostly for the incorrect assumptions of modern SSDs.

 

Thank you. I was about to make a post clearing up these misconceptions, but you beat me to it.

There was a (semi)recent test that took a bunch of popular SSDs and basically kept writing to them until they died, just to see how much abuse they could take. The better ones (Samsung and Intel mainly) could write petabytes of data before giving up. PETABYTES! SSDs are far more reliable now than HDDs for consumer use on average. Unless you're doing something that writes absurd amounts of data 24/7, a SSD will likely outlive its usefulness.

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15 hours ago, Snib said:

False. It doesn't defrag anything on any storage medium at all. What it does is rebuild the cache files by dropping no longer used data therein. Imagine a file containing [good data|no longer used data|good data] -> new file will be [good data|good data] only. It does that no matter where you store it on. Whether the new file will be defragmented on your storage medium is none of the optimization process's concern.

Warframe references its defragger as a command line launch argument. Warframe generates a log specifically called "Defrag.txt". 

There's some issue in your example...

[good data|no longer used data|good data] <- Your example
[good data|good data]                                  <- What you think deleting something looks like only happens after a defrag. 
[good data|                                |good data] <- This is what the data looks like if you just get rid of "no longer used data"... the data is fragmented... hence "defragmentation".

Edited by MillbrookWest
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@MillbrookWest actually no, I don't think anyone would call that defragmentation even if they were to apply the term to a container file format. You talk about file system fragmentation when a single file is spread across non-consecutive locations on your physical hard disk. Defragmentation software typically will not touch free space between files, although some give you the option of consolidating or compacting free space (and it's generally a bad idea to stress your drive for something like that but let's not go there).

Anyway, my point is that the launcher optimizes the internal file structure Warframe's .cache files but does not make deliberate changes to how they are being stored on the computer's file system. As a user mode process, it couldn't even if it wanted to.

Take it or leave it.

 

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The controller on SSD and NVMe intentionally fragment data during writes, by writing simultaneously to multiple NANDS using an algorithm that only the controller understands, so by that definition, optimising a SSD or NVMe is a pointless and time consuming exercise as unlike a HDD, windows has no control over which block data is written to.

My warframe did not load any faster after optimisation (my warframe install and other steam games are on a 512GB NVMe for the record) and actually gameplay suffered from micro-freezes and stutters with 45-75FPS, even whilst idle in the orbiter (prior to forced optimisation, i was getting a steady 60FPS, except for Cetus hallway that is only 30FPS. After several system restarts game returned to stable 60FPS.

Early generation SSD did have more limited write lifetimes, later generation SSD have considerably longer write lifetimes, so Warframe damaging your SSD with excessive writes is unlikely just highly system intensive.

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As others have mentioned the optimisation process does remove obselete data as well. It has probably been set to force it for a bit because of PoE as I've seen a few posts mentioning issues that were resolved by optimising the cache. It removed some stutter on loading screens for me as well.

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