Edge Canary limited disk usage capability on YouTube video upload

MVP

Microsoft Edge Canary latest ver. Version 75.0.133.0 (Official build) canary (64-bit). 

so I was trying to upload a 40 GB video file to YouTube but due to a network error it got halted. as you know YouTube lets you resume your video upload if you choose the same file to reupload within the next few days. but before it resumes, YouTube needs to check the file first, so it needs to read the whole file in order to know where it needs to resume the upload from. so at first my 40GB file was on my hard disk and in task manager it showed that Edge canary's disk usage is 50 MB/s. then i decided to copy the file to my SSD drive, (C:\) but again i saw that Edge canary is only using 50 MB/s disk usage even though it's accessing the file on an M.2 super fast SSD with read/write speeds of more than 1000 MB/s each.

 

9 Replies

@HotCakeX Do you see different results with the old Edge (Spartan) or with Chrome?

Chrome's sandbox architecture may impact disk read speeds for local files, although I'd be surprised to learn that the impact is more than a few percent.

 

Are you relying exclusively on the "Disk Usage" column in Task Manager for your analysis?

By chrome you mean the chromium open source engine right? not the actual google chrome browser cuz this is actually Microsoft Edge.
anyways, i don't understand what you mean by your second paragraph. my SSD is capable of more than 1000 MB/s read speed (actual rate is 2000/1000 for read/write speeds) so there is something wrong that the new Edge is only using 50 MB/s. it is also an issue when we are downloading a file and Edge won't be able to download it faster than 50 MB/s.

Yes, unless you think Windows task manager is unreliable ?
Hi @HotCakeX, thank you for letting us know about this issue. I believe that what @Eric_Lawrence was asking is whether you see this same speed restriction when you have uploaded large videos from other browsers, specifically the current version of Edge (Microsoft Edge 44.18362.1.0) and Chrome. He was also hypothesyzing that the Sandbox protections that exist in Chromium might be responsible for this. @Eric_Lawrence, if this isn't correct, please let me know.
Both the new Edge and Google Chrome are built atop the same Chromium architecture. I'm curious whether you see different results

I can't speak to the accuracy of the task manager's throughput column; it does appear to do some smoothing, for instance.

In a quick test here, I see downloads writing to disk at ~180mb/sec, which is roughly the peak write speed of this drive. Also, keep in mind that your system's antivirus scanners are likely scanning the data as it's downloaded to disk.
looks like the limit only applies to YouTube when it tells the browser to check the video file so it can know where it should restart the upload from. i can't test the same thing on the preinstalled Edge since it's a painful process but i did test both of them by drag and dropping the video file on the browser and then selecting "save video file" so it started download it (actually copying the file from one drive to another) and the speed went over 300 MB/s (Megabyte not megabit)
I use Windows defender.

I poked at this a bit more, and made a little test page to benchmark the file read capabilities:

https://bayden.com/test/diskbenchmark.html

 

This simple page allows you to pick a local file, then the browser reads it into an arrayBuffer. This eliminates the network from the equation, and while it doesn't eliminate all other variables (memory allocation costs, etc), it does provide a less noisy picture. The page itself calculates the number of bytes read and milliseconds elapsed to provide a more precise measure of disk throughput.

 

When I use this page on a big file on Windows 10 RS5, I note that almost all of the disk activity is charged to "Antimalware Service Executable" and NOT the browser process; the browser process shows little disk activity at all. 

 

While the results fluctuate (and this is unsurprising given how disk caches work, etc), I do see significant differences in effective throughput based on browser versions.

 

I haven't yet tried this on multiple machines.

 

Edge 18 RS5 (Spartan) -----------------
Read 2,139,348,308 bytes in 4651 ms
459,975,985 bytes/s

Firefox 68 -----------------
Read 2,139,348,308 bytes in 4394 ms
486,879,451 bytes/s


Chrome 73 Stable -----------------
Read 2,139,348,308 bytes in 2004 ms
1,067,539,075 bytes/s

 

Chrome 75 Canary -----------------
Read 2,139,348,308 bytes in 32868 ms
65,089,092 bytes/s

 

Edge 75.131 Dev -----------------
Read 2,139,348,308 bytes in 10102 ms
211,774,728 bytes/s

Edge 75.134 Canary -----------------

Trial #1

Read 2,139,348,308 bytes in 24106 ms
88,747,544 bytes/s

Trial #2

Read 2,139,348,308 bytes in 2426 ms
881,841,841.715 bytes/s

 

Trial #3
Read 2,139,348,308 bytes in 11456 ms
186,744,789.455 bytes/s

 

okay so I used that website you suggested, selected my 40GB video file and then i checked task manager and nothing major was happening there, CPU, RAM, disk all of them were normal, as if the website is doing nothing at all. also tested it on the preinstalled Edge, still nothing in task manager, is that normal?
I'm on Insider build fast ring 20H1.
about that 50 MB/s limit, I think it's only a YouTube thing
I suspect that creating arrayBuffers over 4gb (as this page does) isn't supported by any browser because they don't want a runaway browser tab to use all of system memory.

I've added an error message for cases where the read call fails.

I edited my original post to emphasize on YouTube only.