Holy Fragmentation Batman!

[Hawk2112]

Last night, I defraged my drive using Diskkeeper 9.0, then went to bed. When I got up this morning, I fired up the PC, and started a new game of Civ IV. I didn't open any other games or applications prior to starting Civ. Played for about 2 hours, and then went to check mail, and the forums here, etc. Everything was loading very, very slowly. So, I fired up Diskkeeper again, and analyzed the drive.

78% of my drive was fragmented! I know for a fact I had zero fragmented files when I started my PC this morning, and in 2 hours time, 3/4 of the drive was hosed. Something is seriously wrong with how Civ is using the drive. Normally, I go 2-3 days playing World of Warcrack and Day of Defeat: Source before defragging, and I have never had more than 10% fragmentation on the drive, and that was on a Blizz patch day.

 

[gunnergoz]

How big is your drive and how much free space do you have? That could well be part of the problem.

 

[tcwleblanc]

im going to check this for you now and see if it happens to me i have Diskeeper9 as well and i justy defragged my 300gig 60% free space drive that civ IV is installed on. ill let you know in a few hours if i get the same result

 

[Hawk2112]

120GB drive, 108GB free

 

[tcwleblanc]

i just played for four hours or so and my drive wasnt fragmented at all before playing and now that im done playing...its still has 0 fragmented files

 

[SilentMage]

My C: drive was just under 10% fragmentation when i scanned it before I installed Civ4. The thing is, I have a seperate hard drive for my games -- my H: drive -- that's where I installed Civ4. However, I just scanned my C: drive and it's at 54% fragmentation! My H: drive is up to 8.7% fragmentation -- it was practically 0% before I installed the game.

What's up with that? Do you think the 54% fragmentation on my C: drive is linked with the memory leak that has been mentioned several times on this forum?

 

[AsnoT]

no, it has to do with having huge EMPTY drives - those "fragment" more easily than full ones (a few chunks written out of sequence will hitch up the fragmentation rate).

secondly, PLEASE get a grip on basics before accusing the game of being buggy.
WINDOWS writes and reads disks - not applications.the app just tells the OS what it needs, and the OS complies (most times).

and thirdly, only civilization's OWN files can be fragmented while playing the game - not the browser's etc.
so a reboot would have solved your problem, not the defragging as such. the slowness is more likely due to a memory leak problem caused by running civ4 - which would be a real bug if confirmed.