Decipher logs

**jmet** · 14 Oct 2006, 03:44 PM

Something (another program) is hogging up all your CPU power.

**techreactor** · 14 Oct 2006, 05:31 PM

It happens eveytime I open any program,the spikes in CPU are expected. But does that mean that Imgburn needs more power than anything else, its a dual core cpu, that shouldnt be happenning.

**Chewy** · 14 Oct 2006, 10:09 PM

Was something else accessing the hard drive at the same time, reading or writting?

**LIGHTNING UK!** · 15 Oct 2006, 01:08 AM

If your buffers are all over the place then that would explain it.

If they drop below the levels configured in the settings (30% main and 50% device) a few times in a row (measured every 250ms), the buffer recovery stuff kicks in.

So now you have to ask yourself why your buffers keep dropping so low?
What are you doing to cause that to happen, or what is another app doing to cause that to happen - obviously it shouldn't be doing it!

You'd do well to fix the cause of the issue, but you could of course just turn the 'buffer recovery' option off in the settings.

**blutach** · 15 Oct 2006, 10:01 PM

Implicit in all this advice, is to leave your machine alone while you burn - unless you got a dual core 4600 or something.

Regards

**Chewy** · 15 Oct 2006, 10:15 PM

hard disk activity

I was under the impression that this meant what it said?

**LIGHTNING UK!** · 16 Oct 2006, 07:37 PM

It does, but ImgBurn only does the hdd activity check once the buffers have recovered.

Buffers could drop for other reasons... like busy cpu or DMA not being on.

You'd think the buffer activity one would be obvious to the person using the pc though. Either they're going mad and you can hear them, or they're not!
Also, if you running defrag whilst burning, you'd know about it and notice that too.

So as the question has been asked in the first place, I guess it's not anything obvious.

**techreactor** · 18 Oct 2006, 05:31 PM

Its a dual code D805 OC to 3.2 Ghz, DMA is enabled, It happens if you open anything winword, IE, VOBBlanker, although I am not processing anything whilst burning, but the buffer recovery remains till the HDD activity is high and I could see that through the HDD LED.

If i try to disable Buffer recovery, will it effect my burns negatively ???

**Chewy** · 18 Oct 2006, 10:01 PM

you might try turning off drive indexing and any background tasks

**LIGHTNING UK!** · 19 Oct 2006, 01:07 AM

Assuming you're opening programs and burning images from the same physical drive, you have to expect slowdowns.

The drive won't be able to cope with the random accessing involved in loading a program / dlls etc AND still maintain a continuous steady stream of data to imgburn.

If you're ever short on memory, you also have to take into account the swap file on the hdd.

If you disable buffer recovery it just means your drive will keep stopping / starting for the entire time the machine cannot supply ImgBurn with enough data to send to to it.

The less stop / starts the better really.

**techreactor** · 19 Oct 2006, 02:25 PM

Yea, I am using the same physical HDD, but its a SATA so throughputs shouldnt be an issue, really. But yes, my RAM is less, 512 MB of PC 4300, so that could be one probable cause, I accept.

My XP services are already at bare minimum required, thanks chewy.

**Chewy** · 19 Oct 2006, 02:52 PM

I had some wild buffer problems with non-standard ide drivers on a nf2 mobo,
but they were also associated with weird burn times, like twice as long as my other boxes. Bad sil sata drivers also.

**LIGHTNING UK!** · 20 Oct 2006, 09:22 AM

Being SATA means nothing. The drives are no faster than their IDE counter parts, the just make use of a different I/O interface.

So it'll still be random accessing to open the program, provide a stream of data to ImgBurn AND use the swap file a bit - hence the disk thrashing and drop in buffer levels which ultimately results in the buffer recovery code kicking in.

**techreactor** · 23 Oct 2006, 02:27 PM

I beg to differ on this, ATA drives has seen the data transfer rate reach its maximum at 133 MB/second, where the current SATA I standard provides data transfers of up to 150 MB/second and SATA II drives with 300 MB/second transfer rates which is twice that of ATA aka IDE drives. Which means that the SATA II drives can handle more activities at the same time.

Although I found that my problem was related to the enabling of 32 bit HDD transfer in the BIOS, the moment I disabled it, the problem disappeared.

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