I use makemkv on my windows 10 desktop while continuing other work. Sometimes makemkv freezes my desktop completely for 5 minutes or more. Is there any way to run makemkv at a lower priority to prevent this. A pause option would be nice but I found where other users had requested this and received no response. Any suggestions/advice will be greatly appreciated.
By the way, I used makemkv in trial mode for 2 months before buying a license. I'm very happy with it.
Wayne
pause option
Re: pause option
Using the task manager, you can find the makemkvcon process, RIGHT click on it, find "Set Priority" in the context menu, and set it to "Low".
The problem is that, even with the lowest priority possible, you're still going to get those pauses - it's an I/O wait when the drive has problems reading the disk. Generally, Windows (and MacOS and Linux as well) will switch to other tasks while MakeMKV is waiting for data from the drive.
But when the drive starts fighting to read data, all the operating systems get "blocked" by the task waiting for the driver software to get data. Often, the logs will show this as "time out error" and "device not available". When this happens, the WHOLE MACHINE is waiting for the task to complete, not just MakeMKV.
It shouldn't happen. It doesn't HAVE to happen, because there is dedicated processing hardware managing the I/O devices. Decades ago, they built I/O boards that had their own processors to talk to disk drives, and serial ports, and such, because everything was "so slow". Nowadays, they still put separate processors in various places, but because everything is "so fast", they share so much hardware that when something is NOT fast, things go wrong.
I'm not pointing fingers at Microsoft, or Apple, or any of the Linux/BSD/whatever people for this... It's primarily the way Intel and AMD implement the motherboard chip sets. If your optical disk is on the same SATA bus as your hard drives, that optical disk can slow down all the other SATA devices on that controller by taking up too much time.
The problem is that, even with the lowest priority possible, you're still going to get those pauses - it's an I/O wait when the drive has problems reading the disk. Generally, Windows (and MacOS and Linux as well) will switch to other tasks while MakeMKV is waiting for data from the drive.
But when the drive starts fighting to read data, all the operating systems get "blocked" by the task waiting for the driver software to get data. Often, the logs will show this as "time out error" and "device not available". When this happens, the WHOLE MACHINE is waiting for the task to complete, not just MakeMKV.
It shouldn't happen. It doesn't HAVE to happen, because there is dedicated processing hardware managing the I/O devices. Decades ago, they built I/O boards that had their own processors to talk to disk drives, and serial ports, and such, because everything was "so slow". Nowadays, they still put separate processors in various places, but because everything is "so fast", they share so much hardware that when something is NOT fast, things go wrong.
I'm not pointing fingers at Microsoft, or Apple, or any of the Linux/BSD/whatever people for this... It's primarily the way Intel and AMD implement the motherboard chip sets. If your optical disk is on the same SATA bus as your hard drives, that optical disk can slow down all the other SATA devices on that controller by taking up too much time.
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How to aid in finding the answer to your problem: Activating Debug Logging