ED, SSDs and Windows Defender

[Jmanis]

So something odd which has been going on recently, wondering if anyone else has observed this sort of thing.

I have ED installed on an SSD, Windows installed on a normal HD. I noticed recently that, after a reboot, I'd start Elite, and between the time it takes for the game to start and me to select a mode, literally everything would hang-up. Cursor would function, sound would play, but literally everything else would grind to a halt; couldn't even launch a task manager or anything.

I took some observations... first one was that if I just left it (for a good 5-10 minutes) everything would eventually come normal. Did some stuff and managed to work out that it's freezing because disk I/O is maxing out at 100%. A quick google suggested this was symptomatic of a failing SSD, but looking closer I realised it was hitting 100% because, once ED had started, Windows Defender would start reading all the game files... literal thousands of disk operations to read files in ED's Win64 folder were kicking off with the highest read times in the order of 1-10MB/s.

I tried this with a few other games and watched disk activity, and Windows Defender seems to be doing something like scanning files as they get accessed for the first time, which makes sense. In Elite's case, this seems to be triggering for everything at once, causing the hangup for 5-10 minutes as it parses 20GB across 33,000 files.

I've got a few other avenues for diagnosis, but curious if anyone else has encountered this.

 

[Kelster87]

I haven't seen this, but I have both Win10 and ED on the same SSD. Just launched ED, couldn't reproduce it.

 

[Ceekay]

I've never noticed much difference in ED loading times between HDD, SSD and NVME SSD, most SSDs have diagnostic software that can assess the amount of "life" on your drive so that might be worth checking.

Windows Defender can add exclusions so folders aren't scanned perhaps adding ED to that might be worth a try

Look under Win Security/Virus and threat protection settings/exclusions

 

[Jmanis]

Thanks... I'll reboot and (try) to get a screenie to show what's going on.... having everything hang up makes screenshots problematic

Exclusion settings might be worth a crack.

 

[CMDR John Luke Paperbone]

So something odd which has been going on recently, wondering if anyone else has observed this sort of thing.

I have ED installed on an SSD, Windows installed on a normal HD. I noticed recently that, after a reboot, I'd start Elite, and between the time it takes for the game to start and me to select a mode, literally everything would hang-up. Cursor would function, sound would play, but literally everything else would grind to a halt; couldn't even launch a task manager or anything.

I took some observations... first one was that if I just left it (for a good 5-10 minutes) everything would eventually come normal. Did some stuff and managed to work out that it's freezing because disk I/O is maxing out at 100%. A quick google suggested this was symptomatic of a failing SSD, but looking closer I realised it was hitting 100% because, once ED had started, Windows Defender would start reading all the game files... literal thousands of disk operations to read files in ED's Win64 folder were kicking off with the highest read times in the order of 1-10MB/s.

I tried this with a few other games and watched disk activity, and Windows Defender seems to be doing something like scanning files as they get accessed for the first time, which makes sense. In Elite's case, this seems to be triggering for everything at once, causing the hangup for 5-10 minutes as it parses 20GB across 33,000 files.

I've got a few other avenues for diagnosis, but curious if anyone else has encountered this.

Never experienced something like that. But consider that right now i'm running Windows from SSD and Elite from normal HD. In the past anything was running from normal HD.

One possible workaround could be creating a rule that excludes the Elite Dangerous folder from being scanned by Windows defender. It's not the best possible solution, but it's something i guess.

How to exclude files and folders from Windows Defender Antivirus scans

Are you getting false positives with Windows Defender Antivirus? Here are the steps to exclude files, folders, and other items from getting scanned on Windows 10.

www.windowscentral.com

 

[Burke]

because disk I/O is maxing out at 100%

How much space left on the HD? Is your memory enough and working? Whats your swop file (page file) doing? Variable size swopfiles can get quite large. I dont how this displays in disk space available it may or may not show. Maybe set it to a single size if you google it first and feel its for you.

 

[Jmanis]

How much space left on the HD? Is your memory enough and working? Whats your swop file (page file) doing? Variable size swopfiles can get quite large. I dont how this displays in disk space available it may or may not show. Maybe set it to a single size if you google it first and feel its for you.

Over a TB left on HD where Windows is installed[1]. First thing I tried was clean up the SSD which was almost full because of old Betas, now it's at 47G used/63G free.

Swop and RAM are virtually inactive during the disk reads. There might be some more diagnoses I can do... though the fact this only happens on ED, and it's the only thing I run regularly on my SSD is somewhat suspicious (there's two or three steam games on there too, but none I play reliably). I also regularly suffer the "close ED, but hangs on black screen and needs to be task-killed" issue.

BRB, going to get that screenshot now.

[1] Not my ideal setup, but I went down that path accidentally and just ran with it. I'll probably sort it out one day...

 

[Jmanis]

Rubbish quality... had to rely on phone taking photos because it's just not possible when the freeze happens. For reference, MsMpEng.exe is Windows Defender (handily, that link has exclusions in it, didn't come across it before).

This is capturing the moment before everything freezes.

Spoiler

This is capturing the moment after the freeze stops:

Spoiler

This is followed by Elite reporting an error; game is still running at this point but if I don't terminate it it just CTD's naturally (not even a coloured snake error).

Basically, once the game runs a minute or two, "disk" gradually ramps-up to 100%.

I observed that there was a heap of other stuff Windows Defender stuff going on across the system which looked similar, but it's I/O priority was "Background" compared to this which is Normal.

I'll try excluding the Elite directory from scans and see if that helps.

 

[Saltyseadog]

I use a 120GB SSD for Windows 10 Home which leaves me 63GB free space on a 99.9GB capacity. I have ED installed on a normal 500GB HD and at present the ED file is 21.9GB I also use the Windows Firewall plus Defender for security and have added ED to the exclusions file on both and have never experienced any problems with it.

 

[Jmanis]

So, having now added ED's Win64 folder to the exclusion list and tried a restart again, the issue doesn't present anymore.

Of note... while starting ED in this configuration, disk I/O never topped 51%, and background disk I/O once the game had started (and presumably, all necessary assets loaded in the background)

I wonder if it's something like ED deciding "Well, I'm not going to use more than 50% disk I/O or I'll make the user's system thrash" clashing with a similar I/O configuration of Windows Defender on startup... starving all other normal-operation I/O and causing everything to hang.

Whether that's the root cause, or just a symptom of some other problem, I dunno. Either way, it's working. Thanks everyone!

(Mental note to self: craft malware to hide in ED's folders)
(That was a joke)

 

[Northpin]

Try the exclusion thing.

Also, ssd performance is degrading a lot for a full ssd. Now you said that you freed some space, but the performance might not get back at what it used to be

 

[CMDR John Luke Paperbone]

Also, ssd performance is degrading a lot for a full ssd. Now you said that you freed some space, but the performance might not get back at what it used to be

Never ever heard something about this.

Are you sure ? Got a link maybe ?

 

[Burke]

Never ever heard something about this.

True for any HD i think. Thats why i said page file cause if space is low then windows will try to ajust the page file size so everything keeps working. If its very small it would require constant disk activity. Im just guessing really but as i said im not certain page file use will show up as used disk space so if the drive is very full that would definatly be a possibility.

 

[Northpin]

True for any HD i think.

This is different than what happens in SSD's.
HDD appear slower when full because reading and writing on inner tracks is much slower than what happens on the outer tracks
For example, you might reach 100 MB/s reading and writing to an empty hdd, but when 90-95% full you will get only about 50 MB/s
Also a full hdd is more likely to be heavily fragmented and have bits of files all over the disk - thus requiring the heads to do a lot of re-positioning

Never ever heard something about this.

Are you sure ? Got a link maybe ?

Things might be better on newer SSD's, mostly because smarter controllers and over-provisioning and extra caches, but no-so-older-ssd's might still have performance issues - especially cheaper ones.
Keeping a SSD occupied less than 70% helps with over-provisioning and makes sure SSD has enough extra-space for all the extra-work it has to do for every write operation.

 

[Northpin]

I've never noticed much difference in ED loading times between HDD, SSD and NVME SSD

I play on XBox One S.
I had ED on the internal HDD - it took about 3.5 minutes to load
I got an external USB3.0 SSD and moved the game to SSD - this shaved about a minute from the loading time.
Not spectacular, but still a noticeable improvement

 

[Vasco Sapien]

Try the exclusion thing.

Also, ssd performance is degrading a lot for a full ssd. Now you said that you freed some space, but the performance might not get back at what it used to be

Correct.

the SSD which was almost full because of old Betas, now it's at 47G used/63G free.

You should always leave 10% space free on an SSD as best practice if you want to help maintain its health.

 

[Vasco Sapien]

So something odd which has been going on recently, wondering if anyone else has observed this sort of thing.

I have ED installed on an SSD, Windows installed on a normal HD. I noticed recently that, after a reboot, I'd start Elite, and between the time it takes for the game to start and me to select a mode, literally everything would hang-up. Cursor would function, sound would play, but literally everything else would grind to a halt; couldn't even launch a task manager or anything.

I took some observations... first one was that if I just left it (for a good 5-10 minutes) everything would eventually come normal. Did some stuff and managed to work out that it's freezing because disk I/O is maxing out at 100%. A quick google suggested this was symptomatic of a failing SSD, but looking closer I realised it was hitting 100% because, once ED had started, Windows Defender would start reading all the game files... literal thousands of disk operations to read files in ED's Win64 folder were kicking off with the highest read times in the order of 1-10MB/s.

I tried this with a few other games and watched disk activity, and Windows Defender seems to be doing something like scanning files as they get accessed for the first time, which makes sense. In Elite's case, this seems to be triggering for everything at once, causing the hangup for 5-10 minutes as it parses 20GB across 33,000 files.

I've got a few other avenues for diagnosis, but curious if anyone else has encountered this.

O.S and gaming on different class and speed Drives might cause an issue with performance.... (Im not 100% sure for home PC and gaming), but i work in SAN storage and you never split storage in LUNS across drives of a different class with high IOPS applications.

You can create an exclusion for your SSD in Windows defender so that it ignors that drive. you can manually scan if you need later.

 

[Wrecked]

SSDs are so cheap now, I just run two 500GBs. One holds Windows, Office, etc... the other SSD holds games. I only use mechanical drives for backups.

As for reliability, you would likely outgrow an SSD before it failed. I've been running SSDs exclusively for work duty in my machines for around 5 years and have never had one fail.