[Bug 6297] Half life 2 based games occasionally do not start due to registry in use

wine-bugs at winehq.org wine-bugs at winehq.org
Wed Sep 5 07:21:07 CDT 2007


http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6297





--- Comment #19 from Stefan Dösinger <stefandoesinger at gmx.at>  2007-09-05 07:21:05 ---
Maybe this bug should be closed WONTFIX.

I think that this is a problem of Linux's disc caching behavior and hl2's
timing. When preparing to start a game, Steam unzips a lot of files from its
data files to the steamapps/<username>/<gamename> directory, even if they
already exist. Linux caches the disk write, thus the unzip is fast. When the
game starts up, Linux starts to write the chache to the disc, propably because
the longest possible cache time is exceeded(there's a high risc of data loss if
the cache isn't written back, should the power fail between write and flush),
or because the game allocates memory and Linux needs the cache's memory
elsewhere.

Now I think that steam expects the files to be written before it closes the
"Preparing to Launch ..." Window; When the app starts, it gets delayed a few
secounds because the disc is busy writing lots of data(183 mb here it seems).
If the delay becomes too big, some game-internal timer times out.

That's just my thought about that issue, I haven't done a scientific
investigation of the issue. Setting the sync flag seems to fix it everywhere so
far, but it could negatively affect loading times, and it will be quite bad for
power usage if you're downloading games with Steam on a laptop while you're on
battery because the hard drive can't shut down because write caching is
deactivated for that directory(so by-by laptop-mode settings).


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