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I adore GOG and really like Galaxy, but for some reason it has decided that it needs to "allocate space" prior to begining a download. While this is not only unnecesary, it is irritating because my work offers me a 5Mb/s connection, so it's taking a friggin hour to allocate space for a game that will take less than three minutes to download.

I have tried aborting the install-- after ten minutes of waiting for that process to complete, I manually closed GOG Galaxy with the Task Manager. However, on running Galaxy again it simply started allocating the disk again like I'd done nothing-- except it started from scratch.

So, three part question:

1. Why is this necessary?
2. How do I skip it or make it go faster?
3. Should this be posted somewhere else? I couldn't seem to find a Galaxy-focused community group.

While typing this it finally started the download. Running slow for some reason, but I'll take 3.1MB/s over glaring at the "allocating" meter.
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CoachWade: I adore GOG and really like Galaxy, but for some reason it has decided that it needs to "allocate space" prior to begining a download. While this is not only unnecesary, it is irritating because my work offers me a 5Mb/s connection, so it's taking a friggin hour to allocate space for a game that will take less than three minutes to download.

I have tried aborting the install-- after ten minutes of waiting for that process to complete, I manually closed GOG Galaxy with the Task Manager. However, on running Galaxy again it simply started allocating the disk again like I'd done nothing-- except it started from scratch.

So, three part question:

1. Why is this necessary?
2. How do I skip it or make it go faster?
3. Should this be posted somewhere else? I couldn't seem to find a Galaxy-focused community group.

While typing this it finally started the download. Running slow for some reason, but I'll take 3.1MB/s over glaring at the "allocating" meter.
Quick question... 5MB connection or 5 Mb connection? Because you shouldn't complain at ALL if you're getting 3.1MB/s on a 5Mb/s line (as the most you should get is just over .5MB/s) Allocating space has nothing to do with your internet speed. It's an internal process that runs kind of slow on Galaxy wherein it determines that there is enough space to download the requested files. Pre-allocation also limits the amount of fragmenting in the downloaded files as the space is reserved for the file, it is downloaded, and then placed in the most beneficial spot on the physical disk to reduce fragmentation.
You could try to clean up and defragment your HDD and see if that helps.
Space allocation is good to reduce fragmentation, at least on Windows.
(I saw some downloaders create 60.000 pieces for a few concurrent 4GB files..)
If it's taking hours, however, there must be some problem on your PC or Hdd (probably too full or messy).
(unless Galaxy's devs actually screwed up something)
Post edited May 14, 2018 by phaolo
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mike_cesara: You could try to clean up and defragment your HDD and see if that helps.
Possible, but unlikely. The same problem appeared on my home computer when I installed the same game tonight. That's a relatively new laptop-- about a month old. My work/travel computer is older, but most of the HDD is unused.

I'll give it a shot and see if anything changes, though, thanks.
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phaolo: Space allocation is good to reduce fragmentation, at least on Windows.
(I saw some downloaders create 60.000 pieces for a few concurrent 4GB files..)
If it's taking hours, however, there must be some problem on your PC or Hdd (probably too full or messy).
(unless Galaxy's devs actually screwed up something)
Galaxy devs are awesome. I am more inclined to think that I screwed something up somewhere than to think that they did. That's one reason I posted here first-- if there's a setting somewhere that is incorrectly set then I can fix it myself.

EDIT: Just checked the disk utility and my drives are being automatically maintained by the system and are 0% fragmented, so it doesn't seem to be that. The allocation phase was much shorter on this computer-- but then I would expect that since it's a more robust machine. Not really sure what the issue is, although it didn't seem to actually affect the install at all-- CIV IV downloaded and installed eventually last night and I played through part of the tutorial as a test and it seemed to be just peachy.
Post edited May 15, 2018 by CoachWade
I think The G-Team should have a look at your Galaxy logs. Feel free to report the issue at mantis.gog.com.
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CoachWade: I adore GOG and really like Galaxy, but for some reason it has decided that it needs to "allocate space" prior to begining a download. While this is not only unnecesary, it is irritating because my work offers me a 5Mb/s connection, so it's taking a friggin hour to allocate space for a game that will take less than three minutes to download.
As others have already said: allocating space prior to downloads doesn't use your internet connection, just the hard drive. One of the reasons to do it is also minimizing the risk of running out of disk space while downloading games.

There's a number of factors which influence how long it takes to allocate the files, e.g. the number of files the game has, but it definitely shouldn't take a very long time --- on my laptop's HDD it takes a little over a minute to allocate files for Civilization 4 Complete. If it happens again, then please submit a bug report via mantis.gog.com. In the meantime you can try temporarily disabling your antivirus when starting an install. Sometimes AV software decides it really needs to take a close look at some files :)
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CoachWade: I have tried aborting the install-- after ten minutes of waiting for that process to complete, I manually closed GOG Galaxy with the Task Manager.
We've recently fixed some issues with aborting installs taking a long time. The fixes are currently available on the public beta version (1.2.42), which you can switch to in Galaxy settings. If you're already on that version, then that sounds like a bug :)
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CoachWade: However, on running Galaxy again it simply started allocating the disk again like I'd done nothing-- except it started from scratch.
It might look like it started from scratch but it actually doesn't (unless the game's folder was deleted). It checks if the file has already been allocated or downloaded and if so, it doesn't try to allocate it again.