Hi,
i recently realised the value of portable apps, so i migrated almost wvery app i use into a portable version. Anyway, Skype portable shows a strange ( bug ) behaviour: every time i write a message, or someone writes me message, it hangs up for couple of seconds, about 7-8. And this happens with every message. I suppose it's something with the history saving, but my flash drive is capable of transferring about 10 MBps (Toshiba Transmemory 4G) and i'm not using it for anything else ( i mean, i'm not copying files and stuff like that ) so it should't be problem. I tried the version installed locally on my PC, this problem is not present. Any suggestions what it may be?
Thanks in advance and excuse my bad English
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Skype portable hangs up periodically
June 17, 2010 - 7:37am
#1
Skype portable hangs up periodically
Welcome to PortableApps.com!
As you mentioned, drive speed is an issue. It's a pretty safe bet that the problem is speed. The speeds they claim are never real-world speeds, especially not when dealing with lots of small files as portable apps use. That "10 MBps" equates to fairly slow - probably well under 1 MBps for practical purposes. If you want confirmation that it's the drive speed, try running Skype Portable from a normal hard disk drive. You should find that delay vanishes.
Without replacing the disk with a faster one, about all we can recommend is keeping the disk as empty as possible, which speeds apps up somewhat as the disk doesn't need to manage so many small files (this doesn't affect hard disk drives much, but flash drives it can actually have a very big impact, I've found).
So sorry, we can't really help you with it much.
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Well, i guess i have nothing to do about that. I am pretty sure the speed is really 10 Mbytes/sec because 50 MB files copies in few seconds, it's really fast, USB version is 2.0, but this is with large files. I'll try to disable the 'keep history' feature and see if this helps, but later, because now i'm using my hard-drive-installed Skype. I'll post the results here, so anyone having the same problem ( eventually ) will use this solution.
Thanks, again.
P.S. My drive is 3.50G / 3.72G free
There is more to drive speed than how fast it copies one big file. The one big file scenario is what manufacturers use to get their read and write speeds they list on the package and in the specs. Unfortunately, for portable apps use, those speed numbers are useless. Portable apps require lots of small, non-sequential reads and writes, so those numbers matter more, as does the speed of the control to switch back and forth from read to write (unless it is a dual channel drive that can do both at the same time).
We're working on a proper speed measurement for this.
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As i thought, when i disabled history saving, the delay vanished. Anyway i'm not able to save history, but i don't think i really need it. Thanks again for the efforts.
EDIT: Ooops, i rushed a little bit. After few minutes it started lagging again, even with disabled history. I guess that's not the problem.