I have confirmed the FPS degradation over time issue. Test results included!

Sam L.R. Griffiths · Post by **Sam L.R. Griffiths** » Wed, 12. May 10, 21:35

frymaster wrote:...

I actually think the amount of memory usage is a red herring (never pay attention to it as a rule) but as the LAA flag actually aleviates the problem for me and I can (alot of the time but not always) get slow down/invisible models after having the game running for some time regardless of the level of activity I have in the game would certainly indicate some rather fundamental issues. I have noted varying problems, from SPF with models in view to some models actually not loading and being invisible to an actual crash of the game engine (very rare since about 2.0 or 2.1 - only one notable occurance that I can remember). I have already reported all these issues (bar the last crash as I have not had a repeat occurance to be able to even try to replicate it), and I am a participant in the beta testing. My impression is that all these issues are somehow linked but not having personal sight of the code I am unable to point at any particular area that is at fault and can only go from what I experience playing the game and from the tid bits of information that are made publicly available.

Sam L.R. Griffiths · Post by **Sam L.R. Griffiths** » Wed, 12. May 10, 21:46

Xenon_Slayer wrote:
Roger L.S. Griffiths wrote:snip
~100 game days is a colossus amount, and under those situations, perhaps something has been missed. That is beside the point as there is actually a short-term memory leak which has been identified and fixed. This is what many of the problems users of 2.6 are reporting.
If you're willing to send the 100 day savegame, it would be interesting to look at. We may find something sinister, perhaps not.

I don't normally like sending massive e-mails but I have e-mailed my most recent saved game (~19MB even after zipping).

Post by **Alan Phipps** » Wed, 12. May 10, 22:09

Hopefully 2.7 will also correct and recover the leak situation with the 2.6 New Home Plot offer where if you don't accept, you get multiples of WarHawk and red fleet in sector for each time of plot offer. There's no way out for losing the multiple WarHawks for vanilla players as it (they) are invulnerable and don't disappear when you go IS like the red fleets.

Post by **Xenon_Slayer** » Wed, 12. May 10, 22:24

Alan Phipps wrote:Hopefully 2.7 will also correct and recover the leak situation with the 2.6 New Home Plot offer where if you don't accept, you get multiples of WarHawk and red fleet in sector for each time of plot offer. There's no way out for losing the multiple WarHawks for vanilla players as it (they) are invulnerable and don't disappear when you go IS like the red fleets.

That's fixed too, although that will have little FPS impact.

Kor'ah · Post by **Kor'ah** » Thu, 13. May 10, 01:45

Xenon_Slayer wrote:To Clarify: The memory leak in 2.6 was due to a mission offer not being cleaned up properly. The player did not have to accept the mission for this to occur, just have it offered on a station. 2.7 will clean these up with no residual effects.

That explains why my flail missile tracking has went right down the tubes as of late. These things really don't like a chugging game.

ISR, PBE, PRG and EBC hit effects also cause the game to slideshow on me now. I can shoot these guns into empty space just fine, but when I'm hitting a target things just go south. Could be related, or maybe not.

I guess the workaround for this is exiling myself to an empty sector and manage things remotely untill the fix shows up. The fewer sectors I visit, the fewer of these missions will be offered and the longer I can delay things before the current game truely becomes unplayable.

tim997 · Post by **tim997** » Thu, 13. May 10, 02:18

Kor'ah wrote:
ISR, PBE, PRG and EBC hit effects also cause the game to slideshow on me now. I can shoot these guns into empty space just fine, but when I'm hitting a target things just go south. Could be related, or maybe not.

Several people have reported seeing this, including myself. I think it's unrelated to the FPS bug in this thread, but I've heard nothing as to whether it's being worked on. As far as I can tell, it also appears to have been introduced in 2.6 (unless anyone can confirm otherwise). Maybe an admin can comment?

johgalt · Post by **johgalt** » Thu, 13. May 10, 06:32

I made a post about this elsewhere, but this seems like a better place to continue the discussion since it got locked.

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=277624

Anyway, a few more observations after reading through this thread:

To prove to myself that my own activities were not the cause of my slowdown, I destroyed all of my property except for the one ship I was flying. I did this in 2 stages.

First, I set out to destroy my satellite network. As mentioned in the post linked above, I had over 300 of them, so this was going to be a huge task. Many were located over 500k from sectors center to prevent their destruction. To simplify matters, I installed the cheats mod to allow me to hokey kill them. Interestingly, this did not help my performance at all. In fact, it continued to get worse. Every time I changed sectors, things got slower and slower. I saved and quite the game, then loaded it back up to see if that helped, but not at all. I even rebooted to no avail. I was stuck at an average 13fps without SETA. Jumping now took longer with SETA than without.

At this point, loaded 2.7 beta3 to see the results of fixing the 2.6 bug mentioned in this thread. After about an hour I finished destroying all satellites. Performance only continued to degrade even with 2.7. My lowered performance predates 2.6, so I really didn't expect fixing the 2.6 bug to have much effect anyway.

I reloaded to before I began destroying the satellites, and the framerate returned to the meager average of 23. I then used the cheat package's "destroy sector" menu to wipe out all my stations, leaving all NPCs in tact. I docked my ships ahead of time, so they all went with the stations, leaving my satellites and player ship as my only property. This yielded about 10fps increase. Significant, but still nowhere near 60.

After reading that it takes the game about 2 hours to fully spawn and stabilize the economy of a new game, I started and played one for about 3 hours. Even with over 160 ships in the sector, and a viewing angle chosen to maximize the amount of geometry in view, I was still getting a solid 60fps in Saturn.

Note that I play with VSync enabled, so when I am reporting 60fps, it could probably be higher.

Kor'ah · Post by **Kor'ah** » Thu, 13. May 10, 08:32

tim997 wrote:Several people have reported seeing this, including myself. I think it's unrelated to the FPS bug in this thread, but I've heard nothing as to whether it's being worked on. As far as I can tell, it also appears to have been introduced in 2.6 (unless anyone can confirm otherwise). Maybe an admin can comment?

Pretty sure it pre-dates the v2.6 patch. Only thing that came of that thread was it a Codec's fault. The problem presisted even after a OS re-install and nothing but WMP11 and drivers on the system.

Course the game I'm currently working on started in 1.4 and has 370+ realtime hours (none AFK) invested in it. All the stuff I've done might be adding up to a critical mass now.

holymoly · Post by **holymoly** » Thu, 13. May 10, 09:59

I think you are right about the on-hit degradation of performance being a pre-2.6 issue. It still can't be a codec's fault, though - since I'm getting it on a clean OS install, same as you, same as others here.

If those two things would be fixed (general and on-hit slowdowns) I could get a savegame with 100+ days as well and then complain on a higher level about the universe bogging down due to overflowing...

johgalt · Post by **johgalt** » Thu, 13. May 10, 18:50

I have seen the on-hit performance degradation consistently in all versions of the game starting with 1.1. It is most noticeable with PBEs, Kyons, and Lasertowers.

Notice the trend: all very high speed weapons. At first I though it might be antialiasing on the beams, but after turning it off there was no improvement.

tim997 · Post by **tim997** » Thu, 13. May 10, 19:28

Ok, so clearly it pre-dates 2.6. I haven't played much pre-2.6 due to performance being unplayable, and hence only noticed it in 2.6 when I was actually able to play... until the FPS degredation bug stopped me again!

Is anything being done to fix it?

Nafensoriel · Post by **Nafensoriel** » Sat, 15. May 10, 02:40

Curious thought.. In a new game with SETA on you can replicate the fps reductions you are seeing temporarily. Is it possible SETA itself has something to do with the problem? Perhaps a slow cumulative effect due to use or just a general stuck on type thing?

EmperorJon · Post by **EmperorJon** » Sat, 15. May 10, 11:10

Any word on which mission this is that causes the problem?

dillpickle · Post by **dillpickle** » Sat, 15. May 10, 11:59

EmperorJon wrote:Any word on which mission this is that causes the problem?

This? From page one of this thread....

EmperorJon · Post by **EmperorJon** » Sat, 15. May 10, 12:02

frickenmoron · Post by **frickenmoron** » Sun, 16. May 10, 05:50

I've started my game on 2.6 and the FPS continue to degrade methodically over time, no matter if I'm in a crowded sector or not. (It's just way worse in a crowded one)

The 2.7 beta boosted my FPS back to 60+ in empty ones and over 40 in crowded sectors, while looking at stations etc. I really can't wait for a release because my 2.6 game is rather unplayable right now, unless I start a brand new game.

sleepy_head · Post by **sleepy_head** » Mon, 17. May 10, 16:14

To the admins and the posters in this thread :

I have something to add regarding the performance of the game. My game is still vanilla 2.5, but I think the situations that caused the slow downs that I noticed should still be in 2.6 and 2.7.

First, when I tested this I kept things as simple as possible. Fresh reboot. Fresh load. No other programs other than anti virus and firewall running in the background.

I loaded game and started in the smallest sector I could find, which is Elysium of Light. I stayed docked inside the Wheat Farm the ENTIRE time during the tests. I did not look at the FPS number as the guage to my game's performance, but used something much more basic : keystroke responses. Meaning, I would open up the text menu, or the universe map, and either move around or issue remote commands to an OOS ship or factory. Normally, you press "c" and the command menu opens up, you press Up arrow and the map scrolls up by one sector. But this doesn't always happen.

So essentially, I am in the smallest sector possible, docked in a station, no combat, no ship movement, and the only thing I do is to look around in my universe map or issue some movement commands for a oos ship to go from point A to point B.

I am finding, repeatedly, that the keystroke responses in the game are very smooth, but then from time to time (maybe 30 to 40 mins intervals) it will get sluggish and unresponsive. When I said "sluggish", I meant you have to hit "c" more than once for it to "register" so the Command Menu would open, or you have to hit the "Right Arrow" multiple times for the universe map to scroll the direction you want. Even holding down the arrow key to increase/decrease the quantity during buying and selling becomes noticeably laggy and jerky.

Note that I would be in the same sector docked in the same station not doing anything different, and performance would go from good to bad, then from bad back to good, and repeat. I believe I found out why.

I have an extensive satellite network. During the slow downs, I see Xenon Invasions EACH AND EVERY TIME. 2 or 3 pages of red entries of Q's, L's, M's, N's moving through, could be in Scale Plate Green, or Black Hole Sun, or the sectors around Ocean of Fantasy. Invariably, and somehow, those 30-50 xenon ships are causing keyboard clicks to be unresponsive and a general slow down in framerate if I undock and and spin around. The framerate slow down is LESS noticeable than the unresponsive key presses, because it is more obvious that the game isn't running as smoothly if you have to click the arrow keys multiple times to scroll the universe map, or to press the number keys multiple times to work through the text command menu.

Something with the Xenon invasions seems to be causing a global slowdown even though the player isn't in that sector, or are aware of t happening. And Since invasions last 30-40 minutes the length of the slow down is considerable. Once the invasion is down to a Q and a few L's (or whatever), then the lag seems to go away ... until the next spawned invasion.

I don't have the tools to verify this, but I have often just sat in a factory while I do other stuff, issuing remote commands or just remotely buying and selling. You guys may want to take a look at the invasion routines to see if there are problems there. We don't want to stop all the xenon invasions, but it is affecting performance when the players aren't even there to enjoy it.

(Incidentally I don't know if this is a similar issue, but a lot of keyboard entries, like Renaming a Ship, or entering in an amount for Manual Buy, is extremely slow. Meaning, to buy 9999 of something, I have to slowly, and methodically click 9 *wait quarter second* click 9 again *wait quarter second* click 9 and repeat. Same deal as renaming a ship. Why is text entry so very very slow?)

EmperorJon · Post by **EmperorJon** » Mon, 17. May 10, 17:52

Interesting!

As for the key repeat rate, it's always been like that AFAIK. Really annoying when trying to type in large numbers...

1 0... 0... 0... 0... 0...

Dread Quixadhal · Post by **Dread Quixadhal** » Mon, 17. May 10, 19:58

That *sounds* like one of the symptoms of old-school key polling vs. responding to keyboard events. If the keyboard system is polling in a seperate thread, it would have that response issue whenever anything was busy (or if the polling isn't frequent enough).

If it is event-driven, the thread responding to keypress/release events may not have a high enough priority.

I'm only guessing though, since I'm not a dev and have no idea how many things are being used via the windows system interfaces, and how many are hand-rolled.

Zaixionito · Post by **Zaixionito** » Thu, 27. May 10, 19:02

Not sure if this is a gravedig (1 page), but I have now gotten around to doing tests...

New Game:
* Empty space: 183 fps
* 2 factories: 167 fps

Current Game:
*Empty Space: 15 FPS
*2 Factories: 12 FPS

I've tried most performance mods, etc, etc... My game is still unplayable, so I am waiting for... T h e p a t c h...