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[cancel.man]

The last two forts I've built (0.31.18 & 0.31.21) have become very mature, healthy forts but ultimately both hit the same problem- they'd suddenly be too slow to be playable.

I know that as a fortress gets bigger (more dwarves, more animals, more items, more mined/discovered tiles) things slow down- that's normal. I also experience frame rate tanking out when bodies of water freeze/thaw and that sort of major event- typical calculation/processor load stuff.

But in both of these games, things went from regular slow-ish-but-playable speeds to suddenly stop-and-go choking speed/stalling/hanging. It gets totally unplayable. And the weirdest thing is, it happens suddenly and I can't figure out what's triggering it.

Sometimes I can fix the slow down by reverting to an old save and the game might play fine for a while- even past the time when it slowed down before- but eventually they all come to a choppy halt.

The 0.31.21 fort was about 10 years old before it suddenly got too choppy to play. It was shortly after a goblin siege but no other major events/season change that it got all choppy. I'd recently reduced the stockpiles a lot by dumping items in magma so I don't think overstocking was the reason it slowed down.

Also it should be noted these are the only two forts I've played on this computer- Windows 7, Intel i3, 3Gb ram- maybe it's the system that contributes to the instability?

[Urist Imiknorris]

Do you have ghosts? I think their lag was fixed in .22 or .23, so it could be them.

[iyaerP]

Shortly after a goblin siege.

At a guess, all your countless dwarves, cats, dogs, random animals and whatnot all waded through puddles of goblin blood. Blood and other contaminants causes more lag that you would ever believe.

[cancel.man]

Do you have ghosts? I think their lag was fixed in .22 or .23, so it could be them.

There was at least one ghost in the last fort and maybe both. I'd never heard of ghost lag- will look into it, may be the culprit.

Blood could be it, but the lag/hiccups come more like something flipped a switch than something built up (even in a short span of time). I had a pretty good dwarf dip in each fort and made use of the dfcleanmap utility quite often. And in 10 years of regular sieges the blood never caused slow downs.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Maybe you have a few ambushes on-map. I hear those can occasionally make processors cry.

[cancel.man]

Yeah, I've heard of ambushes doing it as well. Could be, but once again- had plenty of previous ambushes that never had this effect.

Should also mention that the last fort was at capacity (200+ citizens, nobles up to King) and had been for a while so there wasn't any recent growth spurt.

Is it worth destroying items/stocks (in magma) to keep things moving along? Is it really effective?

Anything else I should watch out for/try to avoid in my next fort that may keep it from becoming unplayable?

[devek]

Upload some of your unplayable laggy saves to DFFD and label them properly, bonus points if you include a save that was just fine that made shortly before it.

We don't have many good samples to look at when studying the problem :/

[cancel.man]

Will do. It's actually hard to save- the lag is so bad it can take minutes just to see the Escape window. I just get frustrated and kill the process

Moved my 31.21 fort (pre major lag) to 31.25, it comes to a crawl again I'll save and submit it. If it doesn't, I might go crash an older version just to prove the problem exists/existed.

[devek]

The dfhack utility set has dfpause, which will pause your game when its not acting responsive.

[Reelyanoob]

I had the choppy lag problem cause me to abandon many lovely forts in ~31.18. But with 31.23 - 31.25 I haven't had anymore excessive lags. I'm getting higher average frame rates with more dwarves, no laggy waiting, and all this while I've been forced to use my old sempron 1.8 ghz laptop due to main PC death.

Try loading some of those old forts into the new version, if you kept them.

[foop]

This probably isn't what happened to you, but I had an unexpected massive drop in FPS in my fort recently.  I couldn't work out why it went from ~150 FPS to ~30.  Eventually I realised that the forgotten beast made of flame that arrived a year or so before had stumbled into the massive cavern lake.  It was charging around vapourising the water and creating lots of flow from the edge of the map.

I solved that problem by killing the FB.  Then I had the problem of the !!crundles!!.

[Flare]

-Kill everything that isn't a dwarf.

-Make a public bath in a high traffic area to wash off contaminents.

- Use dfclean to be rid of blood.

- Stop any generators that you don't need running non stop.

- And if you're producing a lot of things, stop it.