Ahh, update again! Time to dedicate my 3,4GHz Quad Core PC to this valuable process because it makes whole system unresponsive to other tasks. While launcher is updating game Win7 64bit os responds to my mouse clicks with absolutely ageing delay. For example I click on Firefox shortcut, then wait about 5mins for it to load and then another 5mins for start page to appear. During this time I can click with my mouse all I want and I get no response. Same with everything else, takes ages to load. When launcher has completed updating everything turns snappy and lightning fast again. Any *faintest* ideas what might cause this? I've had this since the beginning from ps2 beta. I've tried everything I can think of, disabled anti-virus and closed all other background programs etc. etc. CPU is barely utilized (0-10%) during ps2 update so I can't understand why it still sucks all the juice from my system so that it turns slow as snail in tar. Maybe it has something to do with disk i/o or something like that, but I've tried with updated intel SATA drivers and default drivers, no difference. I have PS2 installed on my 1,6GHz laptop for testing purposes and it doesn't have this kind of problem, Win7 works as fast as it normally does when game is updating, but to me it's kind of odd that it's CPU is almost fully utilized bu ps2 launcher at times, doesn't do that on freezing desktop PC and there CPU seem to be idling during whole update. Slightly annoying.
Does your super system turn completely unresponsive then? I can't use my desktop PC *at all* when ps2 is patching. And why my considerably weaker laptop isn't affected by patching nearly this bad and I can use it normally during patching?
I assume that you 'unparked' your CPU cores for playing PS2? And your HDD is almost full? And 6 GB RAM ain't that much for Win7 anyway... I have Norton Antivir installed and it gives out a message that Launcher puts heavy load on my CPU - thus I am able to open browsers and other stuff with no noticeable delay. But I run Win7 and PS2 from a SSD and I have got 16 GB of RAM to fill. Plus: I don't do much during update process because an update changes many files/directories and maybe even some DLLs shared with other programs (not in case of PS2, I think, but it's a general rule...). So, I don't know why you are complaining about this? You want a massive change of files on your HDD, but you don't want to notice it? We are far (well, a little) away from quantum computers so be patient and wait for the next evolution in PC hardware (approx. 10 years according to HP). Then real multitasking will occure - nowadays it's only time sharing on a very limited system (compared to our brain, for example).
I don't quite understand what are you talking about quantum computers... Again, my laptop has no problems with this and it has 2core 1,6GHz CPU and 4GB RAM, simply no logic why my much more powerful desktop PC is totally crippled by this patcher. Why am I complaining? Because it's freaking annoying that my PC is practically frozen during all that time because of no apparent reason with almost zero CPU utilization. What a strange question.
My system does become less responsive. Like I said, it happens to everyone to some extent. Things take a few seconds longer to open up while PS2 is patching, but the delay is nowhere near as bad for me as it is for you. Reason being that when PS2 updates, it hammers the drive with a bunch of random read/write operations, which take forever on HDD's and slow them down to a crawl. This is very easy to see-if you open up Windows Resource Monitor while PS2 is updating, you'll see disk I/O getting maxed out. If you have PS2 installed on an SSD or on a different drive from your OS, your system will be much more responsive while the game is updating. I'm not sure why your laptop isn't affected as much, but unless you're downloading the exact same patches and adding/replacing the exact same files between the two machines, you can't compare the two. Big patches are obviously much more drive-intensive than small hotfixes since they have to do many more disk operations. Does your laptop have an SSD? Have you tried defragmenting your HDD?
So its ok that PS2 is afaik the only game in history to have such a resource hogging launcher/updater? No, its not and you are fooling yourself if you think so. I can download 10mb/s with torrents, unrar/zip a few huge files and still browse the web "fine". I do notice I am putting my poor HDD through heavy work, it might take a few seconds to open a new Firefox window but once its up I dont really notice whats going on in the background that much. Start the PS2 launcher that has to download one of those small 15000kb(I kid you not) hotfixes and my computer tanks worse than the above scenario not to mention its slow as heck considering the update is such a tiny little thing. I can still use my computer but the slowdown is comparable with when I have done stress testing to check if the OC was stable or not. PS2 isnt the only game that updates, its not the only game with large updates either so why should it demand more than updating a handfull of other games at the same time? *Edit* The solution is probably very simple, put a limit on how much it demands of the available resources... kinda like how when you went to the ingame map PS2 used to render several hundred FPS just because it could instead of having a sane FPS cap of.. something. Just because the game can render a bazilion frames per second when im in the map I dont want it to just as I dont want the updater to demand everything it can from my computer. If it takes 15 minutes to update instead of 10 then I would rather it take 15 and let me do other things without anoying lag while it updates :[
Not surprising because hammering an HDD with random read/write operations of a bunch of small files is just about the most brutal thing you can put it through. Get an SSD and then you'll see the difference.
So you have PS2 on different drive than your OS? My laptop has never had any problems with PS2 patches and I have downloaded same patches for both machines few times. Defragmenting seem to have no noticeable effect. I started to think that maybe my SATA isn't configured optimally as manual says something about enabling bottom eSATA2 port of the i/o shield blabla if using only one SATA drive. But I don't have that long sata cable as it has to be done by connecting 2 sata connectors to each other at the opposite sides of the mainboard... damn engineers, always complicating things.
This is about as silly as if we went back about a year and started telling others to get a better computer to run PS2 because it wasnt badly optimized at all(and still kinda is). "If you get a much faster CPU you will see the difference!" Well, yes... but the game would still be badly optimized just as the launcher would handle the available resources badly or whatever it does if I got a SSD. I would just notice it less than before.
I'd like to tell you that I am old and mature enough to be the only person allowed to fool with me... (but I don't - tell you). You got the answer with the other posts, so I don't care anymore. I just wanted to give you a hint but I see that you are impatient in any respect... An 120 MB update on my internet connection takes about 2 minutes. Even during a new install (9 GB) I am able to surf, read forums or get angry about ungrateful comments That said, there has to be something wrong with your computer. But you don't give information, you just complain about it. So, no help needed, right?
No, there doesnt have to be something wrong with my computer but here is some information that wont help anything unless you are a SOE dev in disguise just waiting for this before you start working on it. I7-920 OC to 3.8 GTX 680 16GB ram good old crappy HDDs running win7 I can patch PS2 and do other stuff at the same time but its slower compared to pretty much anything else I could do. Friends can hardly even use their PCs while patching. Do you have a magical solution to our problems that only affect this one game?
Same here. I can't really do much while PS2 is patching. No one piece of software affects my PC like PS2 does. I've just always had to accept that when patches come, I can go do something else for like, 10 minutes.
Said that, you understand that there must be a difference between your laptop and your PC? Besides the HDD problem mentioned before it could be a difference in packet size (MTU). If the MTU on your PC is not optimized, all packages will be sliced and a transfer header will add to each slice. Plus: You can't compare the download of a single big file to the download of many files with the same overall size (difference in administrative overhead). Unfortunately, PS2 downloads many small files instead of one big. May be this helps: packet optimization Or you could use the SG TCP Optimizer (free tool) but I have no hands-on experience with it.
Just for info. My older 3-core amd with a conventional hard disk (ie. no SSD) could patch PS with no slowdowns at all. Are you sure there is no problem with your drive? I mean, have you checked the event viewer in case there are read/write errors or such? I can tell you though, this is not normal, either there is some hardware issue or you haven't set your PC correctly. A usual example is when you're using more RAM than it is available so when patching AND using the virtual memory at the same time (since there is no physical RAM to use) from the same drive it leads to problems. Sorry if anything I said has been already mentioned but I have no time to read everything. Just tried to give a quick help.
So can my laptop handle patching without issues. I'm sure there's something messed up with my desktop PC but I guess it remains a mystery and might be solved by reinstalling Win7 for example but I'm not going to try that because of one game even if this is a bit annoying. I have tried pretty much everything and disk checks don't give any errors and I can't find any file system corruption reports. Oh well, PS2 patcher can have it's private time with my PC then.
Well, if it happens with PS2 eventually will happen more often and maybe to more important stuff. I'd recommend you try and find the cause of this since -in the case of a hardware problem- it might happen again even if you re-install everything. Whenever I have similar problems with my system (ie. slow downs, unresponsiveness, etc.) the first thing I check is the background tasks, especially any protection software running in the back. If you feel like it you could: a. disable every and any protection software to see if it changes anything b. make sure that if you have a 3rd party protection software , windows defender is not running along with said protection software c. check your system's virtual memory, is it enough? maybe something happened and it got reset? I always set my VM to the recommended value, both MIN. and MAX. So, if recommended value is 8GB then I set min=8GB and max=8GB to make sure VM does not get fragmented (although win7 handles ram perfectly, just in case it doesn't) d. check that you have plenty of space for PS2 to store temp files if needed (I'd recommend at least 20GB free space,again just in case) ...the above seem a bit exaggerated but I wanted to show you how you can approach the issue. There is definitely something that lags your PC, maybe a bad registry entry or maybe the remnants of an old software that hasn't been uninstalled well and windows tries to access it, but since it can't, it 'pauses'. The only sure thing is that PS2 -although I blame it for a lot of other things- is not responsible for this .
