Arch Linux

DoctorSulla

Member

Registered: 2022-12-06

Posts: 2

Downloading Games on Steam locking the whole system

I am quite new to Arch and when I try and download games using Steam it seems to hang the entire system in such a way that I cannot SSH in and cannot event reboot using Alt + SYSRQ + b.

Steam runs fine when not downloading anything but as soon as I start downloading within ~2 - 10 minutes it locks the entire system.

I've tried amending dirty_background_ratio and dirty_ratio to lower values but it doesn't seem to have made a difference.

I am running on a Samsung 980 Pro SSD and the disk health seems to be absolutely fine. Anyone got any ideas?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,300

Re: Downloading Games on Steam locking the whole system

Any messages that indicate failure in dmesg/the journal? By which metric are you asserting disk health to be fine, which tools are you looking at? FWIW Samsung disks have historically been notorious for various blunders/issues with power saving, you might want to try and disable nvme power saving: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_ … ST_support - and to preempt the question, I'm aware of the "out of date" flag, the link it references is an explicit in kernel blacklist to apply the parameter to known problematic devices, if your device happens to be problematic, but isn't in the blacklist yet, you can still try to make use of that parameter.

You might also want to run memtest or so over night to make sure you don't have RAM issues, seeing as downloads will usually fill up the file cache.

Last edited by V1del (2022-12-06 13:20:48)

d.ALT

Member

Registered: 2019-05-10

Posts: 959

Re: Downloading Games on Steam locking the whole system

I am quite new to Arch and when I try and download games using Steam it seems to hang the entire system in such a way that I cannot SSH in and cannot event reboot using Alt + SYSRQ + b.

Steam runs fine when not downloading anything but as soon as I start downloading within ~2 - 10 minutes it locks the entire system.

I've tried amending dirty_background_ratio and dirty_ratio to lower values but it doesn't seem to have made a difference.

I am running on a Samsung 980 Pro SSD and the disk health seems to be absolutely fine. Anyone got any ideas?

I think this could be related to the decompression mechanism of Steam. Also, it's maybe issuing fossilize replay in background.
It's happening to me, especially when dealing with BeamNG.drive updates / applying patch(es).
(but my problem is due to cheap Western Digital nVME which became very hot - thus degrading its perfomances - with intensive I/O)

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DoctorSulla

Member

Registered: 2022-12-06

Posts: 2

Re: Downloading Games on Steam locking the whole system

Any messages that indicate failure in dmesg/the journal?

I had a look through the journal and couldn't see anything that jumped out but don't really know what I'm looking for.

By which metric are you asserting disk health to be fine, which tools are you looking at?

I ran a test in smartctl and it's also a pretty new drive.

FWIW Samsung disks have historically been notorious for various blunders/issues with power saving, you might want to try and disable nvme power saving: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_ … ST_support - and to preempt the question, I'm aware of the "out of date" flag, the link it references is an explicit in kernel blacklist to apply the parameter to known problematic devices, if your device happens to be problematic, but isn't in the blacklist yet, you can still try to make use of that parameter.

Tried this but didn't seem to make a difference.

You might also want to run memtest or so over night to make sure you don't have RAM issues, seeing as downloads will usually fill up the file cache.

Did one pass which didn't show any errors but will give it a longer go overnight.