3 ms·

> But the "rebuilding shader cache". what is it doing? why does it take so long? why does it do it every time a launch a game? Does that happen for every game,

> But the "rebuilding shader cache". what is it doing? why does it take so long? why does it do it every time a launch a game? Does that happen for every game, or just specific ones? Asking because this is a behaviour I saw for a short time (week or two?) a few years ago, but these days it'll just do the "rebuilding shader cache" thing once for a game. Mostly after upgrading the Nvidia driver to a new release. > I have a 10G connection to my nas but things are still much slower than I think they should be. I think it is related to poor interaction between nfs and a lot of small files. That sounds more like your NAS is using hard drives (slow, especially in an array) rather than ssd's. Is that the case? > There are some weird artifacts in the system, I have to start steam twice, The first time it fails to connect to the webhelper, once everything is cached, it starts faster and thus works the second time ... Yeah, that really does sound like your storage isn't set up optimally, so is timing out as Steam loads into cache on your NAS. :( Out of curiosity, what kind of NAS is it? :)

somat 2y ago
With regard to the shaders, I actually started steam instead of going off memory, it is any windows game, so proton is involved, and the message is "processing vulkan shaders", This take a long time to finish(5 minutes for simple game "CW4", Long enough I always skip for larger game "satifactory") I just checked and opposed to my memory it does appear to cache them correctly, that is, only run the process one time. I cleared the cache at one point as nothing was progressing(too many skips, corrupted cache?), I just deleted everything under "steamapps/shadercache" and this appeared to help. You are probably correct about the nas, it is full of wd reds, that is, the very slow supposedly reliable drives. I was prioritizing cheap bulk space when I built it, hoping the infamous zfs cache would save me. On your not quite advise I will probably add a ssd pool and see how that affects the whole system. The nas is a 5 year old home built clone of a IX systems truenas box. 32gb memory. Thank you very much for your kind words on the subject. It is more than I deserve for my screwball system.
- justinclift 2y ago
  No worries at all. I've used TrueNAS before, and you should be fine with adding an ssd pool. That'll work well with a 10GbE connection. :) There's one thing you might want to try first though, which is to create an iSCSI volume from your hard disk pool and try running your Steam library from that instead of NFS. iSCSI is a "single user at a time" access thing (unlike NFS), but the caching acts differently to nfs so you might get a better result. Or not. ;) Am suggesting that as it could be useful to try prior to spending money on ssds. :) The actual mounting of your TrueNAS iSCSI volume from a Linux box just needs the installation of "open-iscsi" (on Debian anyway). You run the appropriate iscsiadm command to log in to the iSCSI portal, then mount it: # iscsiadm --mode node --targetname "iqn.2005-10.org.freenas.ctl:myshare1" --portal myserver --login # mount -o noatime /dev/disk/by-label/NAME_OF_THE_SHARE_IN_TRUENAS /Games Unmounting the iSCSI share afterwards is the standard umount command, then you log out of the iSCSI portal: # umount /Games # iscsiadm --mode node --targetname "iqn.2005-10.org.freenas.ctl:myshare1" --portal myserver --logout Anyway, hope that helps. :)
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Heh, and now I just noticed your earlier message had this: When running games on windows I used iscsi for my games, and that worked well ... Ahhh well. If you want to try iSCSI for the Linux side of things too, then the above might help. :) Using an ssd pool on the nas will be your best bet though. With a 10GbE connection it'll feel like a natively attached ssd, which sounds like it'd be a massive improvement for you. :D

somat 2y ago

With regard to the shaders, I actually started steam instead of going off memory, it is any windows game, so proton is involved, and the message is "processing vulkan shaders", This take a long time to finish(5 minutes for simple game "CW4", Long enough I always skip for larger game "satifactory") I just checked and opposed to my memory it does appear to cache them correctly, that is, only run the process one time. I cleared the cache at one point as nothing was progressing(too many skips, corrupted cache?), I just deleted everything under "steamapps/shadercache" and this appeared to help. You are probably correct about the nas, it is full of wd reds, that is, the very slow supposedly reliable drives. I was prioritizing cheap bulk space when I built it, hoping the infamous zfs cache would save me. On your not quite advise I will probably add a ssd pool and see how that affects the whole system. The nas is a 5 year old home built clone of a IX systems truenas box. 32gb memory. Thank you very much for your kind words on the subject. It is more than I deserve for my screwball system.

justinclift 2y ago
No worries at all. I've used TrueNAS before, and you should be fine with adding an ssd pool. That'll work well with a 10GbE connection. :) There's one thing you might want to try first though, which is to create an iSCSI volume from your hard disk pool and try running your Steam library from that instead of NFS. iSCSI is a "single user at a time" access thing (unlike NFS), but the caching acts differently to nfs so you might get a better result. Or not. ;) Am suggesting that as it could be useful to try prior to spending money on ssds. :) The actual mounting of your TrueNAS iSCSI volume from a Linux box just needs the installation of "open-iscsi" (on Debian anyway). You run the appropriate iscsiadm command to log in to the iSCSI portal, then mount it: # iscsiadm --mode node --targetname "iqn.2005-10.org.freenas.ctl:myshare1" --portal myserver --login # mount -o noatime /dev/disk/by-label/NAME_OF_THE_SHARE_IN_TRUENAS /Games Unmounting the iSCSI share afterwards is the standard umount command, then you log out of the iSCSI portal: # umount /Games # iscsiadm --mode node --targetname "iqn.2005-10.org.freenas.ctl:myshare1" --portal myserver --logout Anyway, hope that helps. :)
- justinclift 2y ago
  Heh, and now I just noticed your earlier message had this: When running games on windows I used iscsi for my games, and that worked well ... Ahhh well. If you want to try iSCSI for the Linux side of things too, then the above might help. :) Using an ssd pool on the nas will be your best bet though. With a 10GbE connection it'll feel like a natively attached ssd, which sounds like it'd be a massive improvement for you. :D