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[Alacron]

When running Dwarf Fortress and the game is unpaused, somehow, it causes my network adapter to lose connection for short periods of time seemingly randomly, aside from it also cutting out during every autosave. I have an internal wireless card in my desktop, and I understand that this is more than likely because DF is taking up the resources needed to keep the connection, or something along those lines, I'm not entirely sure. That brings me to the purpose of this post and why I am inquiring the help of my fellow dorf overseers.

What specifically is it that is causing this connection loss? When watching my processor core usage, I see that one core gets close to maxed out and I can assume that that core is the one that DF is using. However, I have a 3.5Ghz 8-core processor. So, naturally, I would assume that another core would be used for my network connection and it shouldn't be an issue. So, the next thing that comes to mind is my RAM. I have 8 gigs of ram, and I have a program to keep track of my RAM usage. While playing DF (Or anything for that matter, I don't seem to ever seem to use more than 50% of my ram.) my ram stays at about 40%, maybe going to 60% usage, and a majority of that is background processes such as music being played, firefox, messangers, etc. All of that leads me to believe it is not either my RAM or my processor. My video card shouldn't have an issue with this game, it is a Radeon HD 6950 and handles games much more demanding. The last thing on the list of possibilities (as far as I can see) is my hard drive. When building my computer, a slip of oversight caused me to buy a 'green' hard drive and it has low RPM. This is the only thing that I can see causing the issue, but I could be horribly wrong. So, has anyone else had this problem, or possibly know how to solve it? Is it my hard drive, or some other weird circumstance?

Short Version:
DF makes my wireless card lose connection randomly, as well as every time it autosaves. I have a fast processor, plenty of ram, new video card (An all around good newly-built computer.) and I can't seem to figure out where the issue is. What is it?

Edit: Also, I am posting in the general discussion because this isn't really a 'bug' and I don't see where general technical issues would be posted. Please move this thread if it is in the wrong place.

[Jables]

You should have some way to monitor disk IO activity, but without knowing your exact OS I couldn't really say how. If that gets maxed out then it could very easily start gumming up other stuff. The fact that this happens consistently while autosaving seems to strongly indicate a hard drive issue. I don't know why the network adapter specifically would be affected but I guess it's possible.

[Alacron]

I'm running Windows 7, The reason I'm not sure it's the hard drive is because other programs seem to run just fine while I lose connection. I am however 100% sure that it is an issue with DF because it only does it while playing, and consistently while autosaving. What could I use to show Harddrive usage?

[Pirate Bob]

You could use the "Resource Monitor" program to get a rough idea of your hard disk usage (just type this in the "search for programs and files" box - I think it should be installed by default).  While it does seem very likely that DF maxes out writing to your hard disk when saving (save games can be very large) it is very strange that this would make your network card crash.  I guess I don't know much about windows, so maybe this is normal? 

I'd suggest looking for an updated driver for your network card, but that's just the stock stupid answer on the level of "I have no idea what's going on, but this can't hurt..."

[Alacron]

My drivers are updated, but the resource monitor does show that it's using quite a lot of my hard drive during gameplay and much more during autosaves.

[Alacron]

I have found the problem. It seems that DF uses one core at a time, and, strangely, it was using only my 4th core. I don't understand the reasoning behind that at all, but it was, and coincidentally my wireless adapter was using that same core. I set the affinity of DF to the 7th and 8th core and have had no problem whatsoever since.