Disk Maintenance

[joshriddle 29]

Ok so now, my apologies if this is blantantly breaking forum rules, or this is posted somewhere else, moderators please correct me if so. But there is a few things that in my opinion most people don't take into consideration when complaining about the lag of the game, or it crashing to the desktop, or stuff like that.

Due to the nature of the game, the file sizes being used are rather large, (100 MB in some cases). And after playing SimCity for like a good couple hours or so can really fragment those files, meaning throw them all across your disk.

This doesn't only affect your game, but your whole entire machine. It will begin to probably slow down, you may experience sometimes it freezing/locking up.

The effects of a non-well maintained disk in Sim City can be the crashing to desktop, lag, and all the other stuff that haunts us like that. Not to say that it isn't entirely our machines fault, but a good 50% is.

For Windows users, running Disk Defragmenter and Disk Cleanup once every few days, or even once a day like me, can significantly improve performance in SimCity, or even your entire computer. Defragmenter can be found easily by going to My Computer, then right click on the disk you want to defragment, click properties, then click tools, and it gives you 3 options on things you can do to keep your hard disk healthy. Click defragment now, and a screen should come up. Click defragment. If you see 2 bars, one gray and one white, and blue, sometimes red and green, then you are in the right place.

Disk cleanup can be found by right clicking, and then to properties, right to the right or bottom of the graph that shows how much disk space you are using. Also running an error check on your disk, or taking a look at Event Viewer every once in a while can help. In Event Viewer you can look for app hangs, and more to the topic, disk bad block errors, which those type of errors can really make for slow gameplay.

Depending on how long it has been, you may have to run defragmenter overnight, and disk cleanup may take a good 5 or 6 minutes to finish a scan. However, perhaps depending on your machine's capabilities, or how often you are willing to do all this, you could do it every day. Since I do all that every day, I still get a little bit of lag, that is allready the nature of the game and the plugins, but never do I get CTD.

Also you could download Registry Mechanic off of PCTools.com. It is a program that cleans your registry and perhaps if you want to, compact it. Therefore improving game performance all the further.

For Linux and Mac users, I am sure there are built-in programs that can clean and repair your disk, and if not, there are several programs online to choose from, maybe get one or two of them and you'll be good to go.

Like I said, if I am deliberately disobeyiny forum rules doing this, please stop me! Anyway, keep this in mind and your game and perhaps whole entire computer is sure to run faster, not so much lag, if you do it often, no CTD, just an overall boost to performance in Windows and SC4, and it is sure bound to make you all happier.

Josh

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Josh, you make some good points for windows users.  I always used diskeeper to defrag my disks.  It does a better job but it is not free.  Seems to me that if you want the whole thing it is around $100 U.S.

One other trick with windows systems is a little more tricky.  Make sure there is as little running as possible then open your control panel to the swap space controls and turn swapping off.  Boot your machine.  Now find the swap file, which is probably fragmented, and drop it.  You should now boot your machine.  Back to the swap settings page, and set the minimum and maximum values to the same amount.  This will be the amount you need for all programs to be able to page properly when the machine is running.  On XP this used to be 4GB, but if you have, say four processors, I'd like to set it to 16GB (4GB per processor).  Reboot, and your swap space should be in one continuous hunk, and will never change.  No fragmentatioin can occur on it when you set it up like this.  If you let windows monkey with it, it will fragment in the normal way, and you can only defrag it off-line using special software (part of diskeeper).  The mormal defragmenters never touch the swap file.

Linux has a built-in file system maintainer.  Things are going on in the background all the time to clean up nodes and the file space they reflect.  The file system is a B+Tree, and is easier to maintain than that mess that Microsoft is apparently stuck with.  On boot, Linux looks at the boot count, and if it is over 25, runs fsck, the file system checker, on all drives.  Takes a little time, but it is worth it.  This ensures the health of the system.

I've been intensively playing the game for a couple of days now since I got the fix I needed, and haven;t noticed any slow-downs.

There are some Linux tools for disks, but the one I use is Disk Usage Analyzer which tells me about thiings like voids.  I also  can invoke the manufacturer's self tests on my drives, which tells my how they are doing physically, including statistics about the number of activities on each disk, the last five errors that were recovered with the reason, and much, much more.  Very techy stuff, but useful to me.

[z1 566]

I certainly do think that this is a useful thread, and excessive disk fragmentation can certainly slow down your game.  But there are a lot of options besides Windows built-in defragmenter and the high-priced Diskeeper, and many of these programs are free.  People may want to check out the Hard drive defrag applications roundup to see what some of the major options out there are.  I've used PerfectDisk for many years and am very happy with it, but it's probably overkill for most people.

[joshriddle 29]

Originally posted by: A Nonny Moose

Josh, you make some good points for windows users.  I always used diskeeper to defrag my disks.  It does a better job but it is not free.  Seems to me that if you want the whole thing it is around $100 U.S.quote>

Windows Disk Defragmenter noticeably changes the position of data on a hard disk, however it does not that good a job. Now the Win Disk Defrag actually compacts them to make them closer together, and then moves it to the front. Like so:

Not to much change huh?

Green=Unmovable\

Blue=defragmented

Red=fragmented

White= free space

Disk cleanup is very very efficient when it comes to repairing and maintaining disks. It cleans up around 20000 KB of junk I don't need every day.

So I especially stress defragmenting it especially if you have a large volume, otherwise you may start experiencing it crashing in the middle of the night and randomly coming back on if you don't. Or it may just bog down your machine in general. Like I said, always good to do this stuff. Also performing error checks will work too.

Oh and there is an ironic ad for Diskeeper on this page...