Slow program loading with no bottleneck??

[Tim Bassler]

I understand that programs have to load a lot of data - in the case of CAD and games, sometimes many gigabytes, before the program is usable.  In the case of exceptionally large games, like for example the 80 GB Grand Theft Auto 5, this can mean load times measured in minutes, not seconds.  Naturally, this isn't because the games are intentionally loading slowly - they are just busy doing a lot of work.

 

This got me thinking: Which element of a system is responsible for it taking so long?  The most obvious culprit would be the transfer speed of the hard drive, or perhaps the CPU as it decompresses information from storage, or maybe the games need information from online, and the bandwith is the bottleneck.  Trying to keep an open mind to what could be the cause, I opened up task manager and resource monitor, launched GTA5, and paid close attention to all the gauges.

 

Screenshot:

Spoiler

 

First off, I was surprised at just how little data was read from disk overall.  Despite the game's 80 GB size on disk, it hardly read any of it - somewhere between 1-10 GB during loading.  Perhaps this is because a large portion of the data is scripted content for the substantial story mode and many missions.  Overall, however, I certainly wasn't making full use of my NVMe SSD's read speed, so that couldn't be the bottleneck.  Another odd thing was how much data was being written back to disk while loading, and in very predictable intervals too.  I can't help but wonder what that data even would be not to mention if it is responsible for some of the slowdown.

Besides that, the CPU wasn't being taxed, hovering around 50% on all cores.  This suggests to me that there is definitely a lot of CPU bound loading happening, with plenty of decompression (is that how they keep the read volume down?).  That said, no one core was being maxed out, so it seems like the CPU should be able to load close to twice as fast if it could be fed enough data.  On that note, RAM wasn't an issue thanks to my excessive 32 GB of it, nor was network bandwidth, since it was spending most of the time at an idle load mostly being used by other open applications.

 

This leads me to my conclusion that one of two things is the case.  Perhaps the bottleneck is a result of constantly having to go to RAM, since the game is running on such a large data set that the lower level caches wouldn't be enough to work with the game data.  This seems like a reasonable explanation, but I don't know how to monitor RAM read/write utilization the way you do on a hard drive.  Failing that, it seems like there is no bottleneck whatsoever and the game is just loading slowly for no apparent reason.  As a computer scientist, I have a hard time accepting that explanation though.  Perhaps there's something to this that I'm not seeing.

 

Thoughts?

[PowerChaos]

Do you have a virus scanner ?

if No. Then disable Windows build in virus scanner aka Windows defender

 

then try again and iT Will go faster 

 

Greets from PowerChaos 

[Tim Bassler]

I do have an antivirus, ESET endpoint security (my family has a group license and has used it for years with no complaints).  I disabled both defender and eset and retried.  Load time was pretty similar but probably a little bit faster (maybe around 2 minutes instead of 3ish), and system utilization was almost identical:

Spoiler

 

It makes sense that disabling the real time security features would lighten the load on the CPU, allowing for faster loading, but I still can't help but wonder why the system isn't using its full potential to load faster still.  I know it's not thermal throttling either, since my Noctua NH-D15 keeps my i7-4790k cool even when stress testing.

[PowerChaos]

Do you use pagefile ?

as you got more then 16 gb ram so pagefile is not needed 

 

Also is iT only GTA That loods slow Or does hitman also load slow ? ( Or any other big open world game )

 

if so then performe a disk speed test. As you use nvme ssd so iT could be a bios setting ( sata ) 

 

also you could try to use caching and see If That improves the load time 

but If iT is only GTA then probably iT is just not optimized to load faster ( maybe unzip limited to 2 gb ram ? ) or iT use a single core to uncompress the data ( AMD CPU driver update ? )

 

greets from PowerChaos