Help me understand this lack of multitasking capability.

[biostud]

I was watching a streaming video at 1.5 mb/s and at the same time downloading a large patch for world of warships. Everything was fine until the patch started installing and hammering my os drive 500 gb ssd where wow is also installed. Then the video started to stutter.

Since I have enough memory and cpu power my only conclusion is that the streaming video is buffered on my OS drive. The question is why is it buffering on the hard drive when it has tons of memory available?
It was a silverlight plugin playing in firefox. Is it just an old plugin, not optimized for a powerful computer? Is it the os using the pagefile even though it isn't necessary? What could be done, if anything, to alleviate this problem?

 

[Elixer]

The temp storage space is usually on the same drive as the OS, so, it dumps everything there.
I suppose you can set up a NTFS junction for your temp storage, and have it someplace else, not sure it is worth it though, unless you constantly are downloading huge files?

 

[biostud]

I'm just wondering why software/os rely on using the harddrive as a buffer when there is plethora of memory available. It is not a huge problem, just seems like a thing that shouldn't happen on a modern computer.

 

[Elixer]

I suppose they code for the minimal system possible, instead of actually looking at a system to see how much RAM is available, and use that.

 

[Ketchup]

Have you made any changes to the default page file? Windows always uses hard drive space for this, whether or not you actually need it.

 

[biostud]

Have you made any changes to the default page file? Windows always uses hard drive space for this, whether or not you actually need it.

No changes, just standard setup. II understand why it is good for the OS to keep a small memory footprint, but it would be nice if it used all (or at least 75%) the memory available before starting to caching on the hard drive.

 

[deustroop]

You may have hold of the wrong end of the dog.It does not surprise me that installing a large game file on the same drive from which you stream video will interrupt the video. I think next time you should have your games on a separate drive--is what I do.

 

[biostud]

You may have hold of the wrong end of the dog.It does not surprise me that installing a large game file on the same drive from which you stream video will interrupt the video. I think next time you should have your games on a separate drive--is what I do.

The stream was from the internet.

 

[deustroop]

The stream was from the internet.

The stream was 1.5Mbps.The media software reads, then uncompresses, then buffers the stream before displaying it. That's all disk work.If the drive is also busy installing the game files at that time, well there she goes.

The lesson is that multitasking can only be done by Duke Nukem, every thing else gets done one thing at a time.

 

[biostud]

The stream was 1.5Mbps.The media software reads, then uncompresses, then buffers the stream before displaying it. That's all disk work.If the drive is also busy installing the game files at that time, well there she goes.

The lesson is that multitasking can only be done by Duke Nukem, every thing else gets done one thing at a time.

And I'm just wondering why that uncompression doesn't take place in memory. Why it even need harddrive activity.

 

[deustroop]

Don't see how that matters. My understanding is that those bits go to-and then from-disk to video driver . Is disk busy installing a game ?

 

[biostud]

Hopefully all drivers are loaded into the memory.