What is Allocating Space at the install ?

I downloaded this client ages ago and everytime I wish to play/update, it goes through this stupid retarded allocating space sh*t. I dont understand what it is...i've already installed it and it should instantly know how much hdd space i have...what the ****

I've never had to allocate space during patching.

I noticed that the Open Beta is about to begin soon and proceeded to download the client to be ready for it. I didn't expect to be giving Beta-testing feedback this early but here we go. I'm also a Linux user with no Windows computer so my experience with Wine might not apply exactly to others with actual supported operating systems.

So far it has been Allocating Space... for about 10 hours. Process has so far managed to write about 130 MB of information and allocate 4 GB. Space needed by the file grows only at 4-16 kB/s but software seems to be constantly using the disk. I'm assuming that it is syncing the file all the time (instead of at the end of some larger set of changes) or doing something else horribly inefficiently. My disk is actually RAID-1 that consists of two slowish magnetic disks that are capable of streaming 50-100 MB/s easily but completely random access with syncs in between is probably this slow. It really doesn't do that many IO transactions per second.

Also using one big file in general is really not that efficient as the defragmentation application thread proves. Modern filesystems are quite good at making sure that files themselves are not split into too many parts but can still allocate space efficiently from the disk. According to information from that defragmentation application thread, used file format really suffers quite bad external fragmentation that causes storage space to be lost between used parts of the file. If this big blob of a file is opened up and just necessary indexes created for hash keys and verifications in other smaller files, game would take less space and at least some parts of the file management would be faster as well. I believe that it could be made at least as fast as current version in all use cases.

This is the first thing new players will do and it is going to affect the impression of the game a lot. I'm quite sure that no one can fix it before Open Beta begins so I'm not going to suggest that. I'm still going to strongly recommend that someone in development team takes time to change how this part works. It should be possible to do something like this in a couple of minutes at most. Not in hours. Using just the file system itself would also enable skipping the whole process and continuing to the download part immediately.

Hello guys. I've just downloaded the installer since the open beta began and got stuck exactly at this problem. Already 4h have gone and it is still allocating space. I thought about killing the task and restarting, but then it went on a new square to bring my hope back. I just hope it won't happen again. I'm also on a Linux running the installer under wine.

Update: after 4h and a few mins, it ended up and started downloading the game. So maybe just a little patience can help. =D

I'm running Arch Linux 64bit with PlayOnLinux (Wine + Frontend (playonlinux.com)).
It's now allocating space for almost 3 hours! Oh man!
I can just sustain it because of my pleasant anticipation!



(Hopefully it's also going to download the game later on!)

File Allocating Space part seems to be the really slow part. Actual download seems to work just fine with the speed the servers can support at the moment.

Mine finished in a bit over 12 hours. I have tried to track down the reason but I haven't managed to find anything solid. My current guess is that Linux is much careful with sync calls than Windows (or older versions of Windows) to make sure that it doesn't return before data has actually been stored in the disk.

Another potential source of the problem is that apparently Windows doesn't create sparse files like Wine does when writing all over the file (or perhaps there's some extend-call in Windows API – I'm not a Windows programmer so I don't know). On my system Content.ggpk is actually made of about 3500 extents. That means average size of ~1400 kB. I'm going to try defragging this file to see if it makes any difference with startup speeds later on. This is not going to help with install times, though.

I really hope any updates to the installer/updater in the future will help Linux users as well.

"

JukiJulma wrote:

Another potential source of the problem is that apparently Windows doesn't create sparse files like Wine does when writing all over the file (or perhaps there's some extend-call in Windows API – I'm not a Windows programmer so I don't know). On my system Content.ggpk is actually made of about 3500 extents. That means average size of ~1400 kB. I'm going to try defragging this file to see if it makes any difference with startup speeds later on. This is not going to help with install times, though.

At least on ext4, those sparse extents were combined automatically and the game actually started in one second! So this doesn't seem to cause problems after downloading has finished.

Allocating Space seems to be the only slow part on my system so far.

I was quite amused at the 'allocating space' prompt once the download actually started.

Personally I didn't mind the wait, but I'll admit to being *really* curious why it took over 30 minutes to determine that I had sufficient space - particularly since it was being installed to my 3.0 Terabyte hardware RAID10 array (1.3 TB free in that 1.5 Tb partition).

No criticism implied - and none to be inferred by anyone else (yay forums). I'm just really curious what it's really doing. :)

- Roadgrill

PS - Btw, hi all - just arrived, looks like an interesting game!

Another GNU/Linux user here. 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 here, with wine 1.5.22, nVidia binary blob 295.40.

Sitting on "Allocating Space" for ~1hr now, and no end in sight. I don't see any significant downloading or CPU usage going on, so not really sure what is being done.
Hopefully it will sort itself out overnight. I am writing to an ext4 partition. Perhaps I will try installing on an ntfs partition on an external drive.

Very excited about this game, but this is not a good start!

edit: might also be worth mentioning my drive is RAID0 mdadm (sexy software RAID). I saw mention of a RAID array above, so was curious if only RAID users were experiencing this for some reason (which I can't imagine).

edit2: copied installation files to external NTFS partition, and "Allocating Space" was MUCH faster. If you are as Linux-only user with access to a >4GB NTFS partition, I highly recommend doing this portion of the installation on it. The bar filling was very non-uniform, but ~20m for the second half of the process on NTFS, vs >1hr on the first half on ext4. Maybe I will race them later.

edit3: I'm also curious why the devs don't feel an OS call for disk space is not sufficient at the start of the installation. If the user fills the entire hard drive while they are not looking, it seems to me that the user is at fault :) Perhaps there are issues that I'm not aware of, especially with generating such large files. Much love to the devs, but if anyone has a second to peek at this I have many hugs for them. Or maybe this phase needs a more accurate name?

edit4: Raced the file systems. The internal drive (RAID0 ext4) finished "Checking Resources" first, but as soon as the external drive (NTFS) got started, it was no contest. The ext4 installation is still at 2/25 bars, whereas the NTFS partition has reached 16/25. Not going to wait for the whole thing to finish, because the results are obvious.