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ronch
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A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Tue Jun 24, 2014 7:30 am

Hey guys, just noticed this earlier today. I was using CDBurnerXP to burn data on DVD and at the same time, formatting a USB flash drive (the long format, not quick format) as well as browsing the Net with Chrome. Now as per my Sig below you can see that I'm using an FX-8350 which means I can multitask like crazy. The thing is, the things I was doing weren't even supposed to begin to stress my system, and yet when I roll the scroll wheel on my mouse within Chrome there were short pauses before Chrome actually scrolls pages up or down. I just switched back to Chrome from Firefox because the latest version seems to be getting slow again so I'm not sure if this is just Chrome beginning to slow down as well, but I've always known Chrome to be snappy. Is this normal? Could writing to the USB have slowed things down? Or could it be the act of burning a DVD that's causing the short pauses within Chrome? Or did I just likely browse 'difficult' web pages? (Then again i usually surf just the same web sites all the time.) Thanks in advance.
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LostCat
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Tue Jun 24, 2014 7:40 am

Writing a lot of data to a flash drive has caused stalls on my system as well. You're never really supposed to do that with a flash drive...

Writing DVDs wouldn't be a problem unless the drive was forced into PIO mode, which I haven't seen in a long time.
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ronch
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Tue Jun 24, 2014 8:03 am

Yeah. I was formatting a flash drive that started behaving kinda strange today. All of a sudden i was hitting <1MB/sec. with just a few big files being written. I know writing a ton of little files can slow down writing to a USB drive, but a few big files shouldn't be this slow, in my experience. The flash drive in question is a Kingston 8GB which used to work very well... until now. Also, I waited about 45 minutes to write 4.8GB worth of data... only to end up writing just 2+GB after the write operation seemed to have finished successfully. Maybe it's time to discard it.
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Tue Jun 24, 2014 8:09 am

Boy, I remember the bad old days when even burning a CD meant you started the burn then gently crept out of the room so as not to offend the spirits of burning.
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Tue Jun 24, 2014 8:58 am

Trying to burn a CD on a system with one of those horrible 5.25" Quantum Bigfoot drives that can barely maintain a high enough STR to keep the drive cache full. I must have had a 50% coaster-to-CD ratio before I dumped that joke of a drive. :evil:
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Tue Jun 24, 2014 9:18 am

I have an FX-8320, but I run Linux so we're kind of comparing apples and oranges here. That said, a few thoughts/questions...

- The only time I see browser slowdowns like you've described is when there's a mis-behaving Flash application running in one of the browser windows.

- Does the issue only seem to affect actions you initiate with the mouse, or is it an overall sluggishness?

- Is the mouse connected to the same USB root hub as the thumbdrive?

- Is the DVD burner SATA or USB, and if USB is it connected to the same root hub as the mouse?

- Can you do some tests to narrow it down to whether heavy thumbdrive activity vs. DVD burning is the issue, or does it only happen when both are happening at the same time?

- Cheap thumbdrives -- even name brand ones -- are a crapshoot. I've seen write speeds drop into the mid-100s of KB/sec.

- I have seen the "write appears to complete but files are truncated or missing" issue on Linux as well, when writing lots of data to a slow thumbdrive. This happens in spite of doing a "safely remove" before unplugging the drive, and has happened on multiple thumbdrives which appear to be healthy otherwise. I wonder if there's some sort of timeout that isn't being handled properly, which occurs only when the drive is really slow and there's lots of data queued up. On Linux, it seems I can prevent the problem by issuing a "sync" command (and waiting for it to complete) *before* doing the "safely remove" from the File Manager GUI; but A) I shouldn't need to do this (WTF is "safely remove" doing, if it isn't ensuring that all data has been written?); and B) it doesn't help you since you're running Windows.
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Tue Jun 24, 2014 11:00 am

Explorer has thrown a hissyfit since the dawn of time the minute a drive goes offline or stalls.
So many people back in the day used to complain of PC lockups that were in fact just a scratched CD they'd forgotten to remove from their drive.
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Tue Jun 24, 2014 12:13 pm

you definitely shouldn't be seeing that kind of low performance.

I have a similarly well-threaded system--a 4930k that's also running Win7--and every once in a while I go I/O crazy on it too. As a crazy home theater enthusiast, a somewhat common usage scenario for me would be:

--Ripping Blu-rays from a USB 3.0 BD drive to SATA HDD 1; AnyDVD reports speeds as high as 48MB/s.
--Extracting audio and video tracks from an .m2ts on SATA HDD 1 and muxing to an MKV file on SATA HDD 2:
--Sending ~30GB MKV files to the file server via gigabit ethernet
--Playing FLAC files stored on the file server--sometimes even high-res albums at ~5.5mbps
--All while surfing the net (firefox) as I wait for everything to complete.

I've never noticed any slowdown or hesitation. The OS and Firefox are both stored on an SSD, which definitely helps to keep performance up. I don't think I've ever burned a DVD on this machine, but somehow I doubt that would slow it down. I have burned plenty of discs on my old Socket 939 Opteron system without any noticeable decrease in performance.

So yeah, something doesn't seem quite right there. Could be a DPC latency issue--do you notice any audio dropouts when it slows down? My old Core 2 Duo based laptop was just terrible in that way. Switching from Microsoft IGP drivers to an Intel driver helped a bit, but it still wasn't perfect.
 
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Tue Jun 24, 2014 7:23 pm

I have a relatively lowly i5-2500K, four cores no HT, and I routinely slam many GB/s (not typo) through my machine while browsing and doing other things.

I would humbly suggest that the thing holding you back is the thing that has been holding AMD back in general for years now: Chipsets that can be charitably referred to as 'second rate', particularly with regards to their USB and SATA implementations.

Please disregard if that thought upsets you at all.
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ronch
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Thu Jun 26, 2014 2:58 pm

JBI, I'm in inclined to think it has something to do with SATA or som heavy I/O. I've noticed hiccups as well when playing a game (I think it was Oblivion) and it would stall for a blink of an eye whenever it loads new areas. Now I know there can be other factors for this but it seems this isn't confined to Oblivion exclusively. For some reason, in retrospect it seems even moderately heavy I/O can stall a whole machine down a tiny bit regardless of the number of coars. Kinda makes the idea of having more cores moot, doesn't it? I'll have to do a few more tests but it's way past my bedtime.
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LostCat
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Sat Jun 28, 2014 10:15 pm

I've had that sorta feel happen with my Samsung HD103SI heh. Old kit, but it still works...

Fortunately, I don't really use it for much. Currently, since Macrium Reflect actually worked (thanks TR peeps!) my OS is on my other 1TB, all my games are on the 2TB, and the Samsung is pretty much exclusively relegated to File History.
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Forge
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Sat Jun 28, 2014 11:09 pm

ronch wrote:
JBI, I'm in inclined to think it has something to do with SATA or som heavy I/O. (snip) For some reason, in retrospect it seems even moderately heavy I/O can stall a whole machine down a tiny bit regardless of the number of coars. Kinda makes the idea of having more cores moot, doesn't it?


If you do not have any I/O, or even not enough I/O, the number of cores is completely meaningless. If the data isn't moving, it just determines how many cores are exploring the very bottom power saving modes, since there's nothing left to compute.

This is the sad, ugly truth that drove me from AMD's arms to Intel's, back in the Core 2 era. It doesn't matter how awesome your CPU is, if the data isn't moving. I really think Intel brought a whole new level of play with the ICHX south bridges, and they've been batting a thousand ever since, at least on I/O; That's the bedrock you need, to build a tower. Sand or mud, or even loose rock simply will not do.
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NovusBogus
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Sat Jun 28, 2014 11:45 pm

Captain Ned wrote:
Boy, I remember the bad old days when even burning a CD meant you started the burn then gently crept out of the room so as not to offend the spirits of burning.

Heheh...I still steadfastly refuse to have any other active programs running or do anything at all while the burn is in progress. My first through on seeing the thread was to suggest verifying that the disk works as expected.

Anyway, this sounds like it might be a motherboard bandwidth issue. I'm not aware of any useful quantitative studies narrowing it down but there's only so much data transfer a motherboard can handle before it starts to choke. I have the same issue at work when trying to do GUI type stuff while a couple of Xeon cores are pegged at 100%. Even terminal windows get a little bit laggy, which is no small feat.
 
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Sun Jun 29, 2014 7:11 am

Something else to try is booting from a USB drive and testing it while running a Linux distro. That would eliminate the OS as issue and tell you your hardware is to blame.
 
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Sun Jun 29, 2014 9:26 am

Forge wrote:
ronch wrote:
JBI, I'm in inclined to think it has something to do with SATA or som heavy I/O. (snip) For some reason, in retrospect it seems even moderately heavy I/O can stall a whole machine down a tiny bit regardless of the number of coars. Kinda makes the idea of having more cores moot, doesn't it?

If you do not have any I/O, or even not enough I/O, the number of cores is completely meaningless. If the data isn't moving, it just determines how many cores are exploring the very bottom power saving modes, since there's nothing left to compute.

This is the sad, ugly truth that drove me from AMD's arms to Intel's, back in the Core 2 era. It doesn't matter how awesome your CPU is, if the data isn't moving. I really think Intel brought a whole new level of play with the ICHX south bridges, and they've been batting a thousand ever since, at least on I/O; That's the bedrock you need, to build a tower. Sand or mud, or even loose rock simply will not do.

NovusBogus wrote:
Anyway, this sounds like it might be a motherboard bandwidth issue. I'm not aware of any useful quantitative studies narrowing it down but there's only so much data transfer a motherboard can handle before it starts to choke. I have the same issue at work when trying to do GUI type stuff while a couple of Xeon cores are pegged at 100%. Even terminal windows get a little bit laggy, which is no small feat.

While I agree that AMD has fallen behind the curve with their chipsets, I/O bandwidth is not the problem in this particular case. DVD burning is not an I/O intensive task; 24x data rate on a DVD is only 33 MB/sec (66 MB/sec total counting the reads from disk during burning). Even AMD's outdated southbridge designs can handle that without breaking a sweat.

To the OP -- I suppose if you're burning lots of small files from a mechanical HDD you could be causing the HDD to thrash, which could affect overall system performance. But that still shouldn't have a significant effect on web browsing. Does the slowdown occur regardless of whether you're burning individual files or an ISO image?
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Deanjo
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Sun Jun 29, 2014 12:05 pm

ronch wrote:
Hey guys, just noticed this earlier today. I was using CDBurnerXP to burn data on DVD and at the same time, formatting a USB flash drive (the long format, not quick format) as well as browsing the Net with Chrome. Now as per my Sig below you can see that I'm using an FX-8350 which means I can multitask like crazy. The thing is, the things I was doing weren't even supposed to begin to stress my system, and yet when I roll the scroll wheel on my mouse within Chrome there were short pauses before Chrome actually scrolls pages up or down. I just switched back to Chrome from Firefox because the latest version seems to be getting slow again so I'm not sure if this is just Chrome beginning to slow down as well, but I've always known Chrome to be snappy. Is this normal? Could writing to the USB have slowed things down? Or could it be the act of burning a DVD that's causing the short pauses within Chrome? Or did I just likely browse 'difficult' web pages? (Then again i usually surf just the same web sites all the time.) Thanks in advance.


I noticed the same thing when utilizing USB storage on my 8350/990FX setup. Mouse got jumpy in Windows 8. Scoured the net and found a firmware update for the Asmedia USB 3 chipset after looking at the logs in linux and found tons of USB link renegotiations. After the firmware was updated, those disappeared.
 
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Re: A bit of lag when burning a DVD while browsing

Sun Jun 29, 2014 1:03 pm

Deanjo wrote:
I noticed the same thing when utilizing USB storage on my 8350/990FX setup. Mouse got jumpy in Windows 8. Scoured the net and found a firmware update for the Asmedia USB 3 chipset after looking at the logs in linux and found tons of USB link renegotiations. After the firmware was updated, those disappeared.

Interesting. Is this a firmware update that gets flashed once into the USB chipset itself, or is it something that gets loaded into the chipset by the OS on each boot?
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