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[Irenices]

So my current fortress is finally coming to a horrible slow demise, and after going from 260 dwarfs down to about 40 now i thought it was odd that my fps never increased.  When i was at about 200 dwarfs i still had around 100 fps and at the fortresses peak i was running at like 50fps, now as i said before with like 40 dwarfs now its still at about 50fps.

I decided to try to get it running fast again and now iv basicly atom smashed 1000's of items, every free rock, log, cloths, armor, weapons ect.. you get the point and i used the clean function in DF hack to remove all the blood and other gook from the map.  After all that my fps has not increased one tiny bit is still 50, so if its not dwarfs or items eating up the fps what is it?

Playing with temp off from the start, thought id mention that.

[Sphalerite]

Do you have any ghosts?  Ghosts cause massive FPS drain.

[Hesperid]

I've experienced the same.  Pathing issues from too many dwarves and having too many items can cause reversible FPS drops that you can fix by getting rid of items or dwarves, but over the lifetime of the fortress regardless of what you do performance will still slowly deteriorate and won't ever come back.

It could be that the game doesn't clean up properly, and is left processing phantom things that are supposed to be removed from play and shouldn't be considered, and that this junk just builds up over time.

[Meta]

The number of objects and numerous open spaces (more available paths) seem to aggravate the FPS losses. Or so I believe. I could be wrong.

[thegoatgod_pan]

I don't know about you but I always keep some kind of industry running out of boredom, or engrave or something.  All those factors add up. Atomsmashing needs to be a daily part of life in a long term fort. Also fort f.p.s. drops incrementally as each cavern is accessed.  This can be managed by sealing off areas and restricting areas.

[Talvieno]

I have no idea what would cause the FPS issues... But really - 50 fps isn't that bad, in the whole scheme of things. I rarely get that high after I play through a couple years. I'm betting a large part is the caverns you've accessed - no matter what you do, you can't un-discover them, as far as I know.

[Lemunde]

Lower the number of caverns. Lower your population and child cap. Don't mine out giant rectangles.

[Quietust]

Do you have any ghosts?  Ghosts cause massive FPS drain.

That was supposed to have been fixed in version 0.31.22.

How many animals do you have?

Lower the number of caverns. Lower your population and child cap. Don't mine out giant rectangles.

While that advice is useful for preventing FPS drops in the first place, it's not particularly useful for somebody trying to raise FPS in an existing fortress.

[Lemunde]

Lower the number of caverns. Lower your population and child cap. Don't mine out giant rectangles.

While that advice is useful for preventing FPS drops in the first place, it's not particularly useful for somebody trying to raise FPS in an existing fortress.

Well that's kind of my point. Once a fortress crosses a certain threshold it's pretty much impossible to get any significant amount of FPS back. Keeping your population relatively small and designing your fortress in such a way that areas are easy to path to is key to making sure that threshold is never reached.

[Irenices]

I had a few ghosts around, more and more as i stopped caring what was happening in the fort and was just focused on destroying but never an extreme amount of them, i kept the animal population at about 40 (many many kittens and puppys met there end).

I sealed the caverns that i had opened up fully but i had them open for a long time, even when my fps was 100+.  I had smoothed the whole fortress but i had very few engravings, only a couple of walls and one or two small rooms.

One thing i noticed in legends when i ended the fort was that there where about a bunch of sieges that said they only ended in 141 when i abandoned, i had killed and run off every siege that ever attacked fully and wasnt under siege when i abandoned.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Jenniretta]

I'm not entirely sure why, but in basically every version of the game I've noticed a loss of FPS as the fortress ages, even in a fortress with only one dwarf it will eventually slow to a crawl compared to what it was at embark.
If I had to guess, I would think it's because the game has to keep track of everything, the longer a fort exists, the more stuff there is to keep track of (as animals come and go, stones get excavated, caverns and water are found, weather and temp changes if they're on, politics and relations with your neighbors, the piles and piles of corpses you'll probably have after a few years. Even if you don't seem to be doing much, the number of things the game needs to keep an eye on grows pretty rapidly.
A few tricks to help this is to make an atom smasher and dispose of anything and everything you don't need, even this won't free up your FPS entirely but it can buy some more time before you're in 1FPS. Also close off useless paths (wall them off) so they wont be considered for pathing calculations. Cage animals, kill wild animals, if there is any water (there probably is) try to keep it from having any flow, ditto for magma if you can manage it.
Beyond that, there will still be a steady drop in FPS for whatever reasons, it may be that there is more the game tracks behind the scenes than I am aware of, maybe it's just some issues with optimizing the engine, I've found nothing to prevent this.

50FPS is actually very high, though, in my experience. Freshly embarked in the 2D versions of the game when I still had a windows partition to play it on, I started with 50FPS and it declined from there. My current fortress in the newest linux-native version is running at 10-20FPS(depending on number of idlers mostly) (111 dwarves, ~5 years old, all cavern layers etc breached and open, running water, etc.) It started at 98FPS at embark

[eggrock]

I'm not entirely sure why, but in basically every version of the game I've noticed a loss of FPS as the fortress ages, even in a fortress with only one dwarf it will eventually slow to a crawl compared to what it was at embark.

I need to test this, posting to watch.

I'll try a 4x4 (or maybe 2x6) embark, and wall off a dorf with a pick, a cat, an anvil, enough oddments to (hopefully) satisfy any moods, and food and drink for ten years. The dorf will do some minimal mining to gather material, build a bedroom, meeting room, office etc., farm and generally have all labors enabled--or enabled at need since it appears that mining/carpentry and stoneworking can't all be enabled at once.

The other six dorfs will get burrowed at the edge of the map, hopefully protecting the single dorf from ghosts (until memorials can be engraved.)

We'll see how the FPS goes.

[Jenniretta]

I'm not entirely sure why, but in basically every version of the game I've noticed a loss of FPS as the fortress ages, even in a fortress with only one dwarf it will eventually slow to a crawl compared to what it was at embark.

I need to test this, posting to watch.

I'll try a 4x4 (or maybe 2x6) embark, and wall off a dorf with a pick, a cat, an anvil, enough oddments to (hopefully) satisfy any moods, and food and drink for ten years. The dorf will do some minimal mining to gather material, build a bedroom, meeting room, office etc., farm and generally have all labors enabled--or enabled at need since it appears that mining/carpentry and stoneworking can't all be enabled at once.

The other six dorfs will get burrowed at the edge of the map, hopefully protecting the single dorf from ghosts (until memorials can be engraved.)

We'll see how the FPS goes.

haven't gone so far as to minimize everything, my solo-dwarf fortresses still expand and such, and acumulate some junk, so I'm interested to see how this goes with a low-mining and minimal junk-accumulation run.