Larger Buffer Size

[Joe From Phila]

This is my suggestion. Make the buffer size go to 1Gig or 2Gigs.

I use a usb2 hard drive for my iso files. When i burn Everything is fine up to 12X

After 12x buffer slowly goes down and then fills up a couple of times.

if I had a larger buffer would not need to stop and fill again.

[LOCOENG]

http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?s=&...ost&p=70772

[dontasciime]

It is down to your USB High Speed. It is better on some hardware than on others, that can be USB chip on your mobo or in your external hard drive.

 

If you have an addon card to give you extra ports try using the motherboard usb ports.

 

If your writer and your hard drive are both connected via Usb then try using an addon pci usb card and split the writer and the hard drive Eg keep hard drive on mobo usb port put the writer on PCI - port.

 

Whatever your setup also defrag your external hard drive and check it for errors.

[duggy]

Actually a larger buffer would help other people too.

 

I fire up two instances of imgburn and burn to two burners. I've noticed when one instance of imgburn slows down (before it speeds up to the next high speed) it locks up the other instance of imgburn too because the other instance of imgburn appears unable to read from the HD. Now if the buffer was larger the other instance of imgburn would not be affected as it would be able to use what it had in its bufffer to write out in the mean time. It does use its 256MB buffer but it uses it all before the drives mange to start writing data.

 

Happens to both drives, one first then the other as they both get to the "speed zones".

[LIGHTNING UK!]

You'll probably find all I/O is locking up whilst windows deals with the request (ImgBurn isn't in control at this point) and so the buffer won't help.

 

In any case, I've upped the limit to 512MB in the next release.

[duggy]

you're probably right, i can surf and but opening "my computer" doesn't do much as the whole io subsystem is hung. I can see the other instance of ImgBurn chewing into the buffer so its still burning, so I think the exclusive lock is allowing it to write still.

 

I was wondering if its possible to enter the buffer size of chose something larger still?. I've got 4GB of ram in this PC so am quite happy to give them (two instance of ImgBurn) a gig of buffer. If its technically hard then don't bother, the fact that you've been kind enough to double the buffer to 512MB is great and appreciated. Interestingly I prefer to burn my DL discs so the problem doesn't seem so bad with those burns, its these SL discs that I burn much faster that chew threw their respective buffers that cause this situation to happen. Hopefully the locked device with 512MB buffer will be enough to feed the good drive whilst the other ones getting on with doing whatever it does when this happens.

 

When the next release is out, I'll give it a whirl and let you know how I get on....in the mean time, thanks again, have a nice weekend, though its forecast to piss it down :-(

[duggy]

well just burned 2 DL discs on both my drive at the same time with buffer set to 512MB and not a single error in the logs. Burn speed for both set to 2.4X (media rated at this). Next test to burn SL discs at max speed at the same time

[Vlad_MX]

Hello,

 

First of all, thank you for the great app you've made.

 

As some other users, I would also appreciate a larger buffer.

 

I have two identical machines (Dell Optiplex 745 Core2Duo), one with 1 GB of RAM and the other with 3 GB of RAM (which I understand, is the limit on the Win32 plattform). Frequently, I burn DVD's to an external USB drive at 16X speed, on the 3 GB RAM machine, reading img files over a 1GB speed network from the 1 GB RAM machine. Sometimes the buffer goes empty completely before refilling. Burning always finishes fine (due to Burn-Proof), but one could feel more comfortable with a larger buffer (a 1.5 GB buffer will leave almost 200 MB of free RAM on the system). I think that way there would be much more chances to avoid problems (many images are not full DVD-SL size, cd's would fit completely on buffer, so, once the rest of the img is on the buffer, the disk would be mostly warrantied to burn successfully). Maybe Burning at 20X would also be benefited.

 

With this on mind, maybe it would be possible to implement two things: One, If the img fits completely on memory and several copies are requested, keep it in memory for the next copies (maybe this is already how it works) and, second, have an option to copy disk "on the fly", with a somehow reliable mechanism.

 

Once again, thanks for the great software.

[dontasciime]

limitations of USB bandwidth add to that network tx/rx combined = buffer fluctuation and even running on empty.