protonscr

Steam updating PAYDAY 2 Causes high I/O usage and freeze entire system

steamopen duplicateSteam client
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#8152 · opened 2021-10-16 by alou-S · updated 2021-11-24 · 4 comments · github
Aalou-S 2021-10-16 github

System Information

  • Steam client version (build number or date): Oct 13 2021, at 19:47:24
  • Distribution : Arch Linux
  • Opted into Steam client beta?: Yes
  • Have you checked for system updates?: Yes

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Whenever Payday 2 updates it leads to deadlocking the system and freezing Steam UI due to massive IO usage.
I have observed from iotop that there are over 20 to 30 processes named steam [CGenericAsyncFi] running simultaneously all using disk IO.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

  1. Wait for Payday 2 Update.
  2. Start Update
  3. Watch as system and steam get stuck until update is done.

Other notes:

CPU : Intel i3 540 @ 3.06GHz
HDD : Seagate 1TB 7200RPM (ST1000DM010-2EP102)
IO Scheduler : bfq
Filesystem : type btrfs (rw,relatime,compress-force=zstd:3,space_cache,autodefrag,subvolid=5,subvol=/)

This issue has been happening for a few weeks. Don't know the exact time when it started.

Kkisak-valve maintainer 2021-10-16 github

Most likely a duplicate of #4978 / #5404 / #6073 / #7720.

Ttheokrueger 2021-10-16 github

to my understanding this is because of PAYDAY 2's asset blob system, where to limit size of updates they will patch the modified asset bundles instead of redownloading the whole thing. this is a slow and inefficient process which occurs on all operating systems when updating PAYDAY 2, not related to Steam.

YYellowOnion 2021-11-22 github

Do you have swap on that HDD? maybe try deadline iosched, and disable autodefrag (increases write latency), and maybe check btrfs' zstd kernel thread CPU usage (htop), and see if it's starving your CPU.

Aalou-S 2021-11-24 github
  • No I don't use a swap on disk.
  • Changing the IO scheduler didn't seem to effect it neither did disabling autodefrag.
  • CPU usage is not too high. Just hovers around 25 ish percent.

Nothing extracted yet.