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[Mr Frog]

...Is it normal for the demons to seemingly have trouble pathing into the fort? I've tried a couple times on the same spire with slightly different setups, and the result was the same: the demons headed up the tube as normal, hit the staircase leading up into my fort, and then the game went haywire -- FPS drops to 1 frame every 8 seconds or so as the demons at the bottom of the spire stop attempting to enter the fortress and just sort of wander around Hell. The first time I tried this, I let the game run as normal for a few hours and while a bunch of demons managed to get in, there was consistently a small cluster that would sit at the top of the spire and refuse to move, as though they couldn't all squeeze through the 1x1 staircase above them. The demons still in hell continued to roam around randomly and made no attempt to head up into my fort, instead dispersing further and further away from the spire I pierced. I had less then 1FPS throughout all of this. Is this normal/expected?

[PatrikLundell]

Yes and no. My experience is that they normally either try to path into your fortress or completely ignore paths for whatever reason, although I frequently get campers who just sit motionless unless you send a sacrifice in too close (in which case I suspect they'll just get back to their camping after the slaughter).
My experience of clown campers is that they behave like any other campers (animals, FBs and Titans): they just sit motionless without draining FPS.

It sounds like you're suffering from a pathing bug similar to that which can affect tame animals: there are reports of cases where the FPS plummets very seriously, as as soon as the erroneously pathing animal is slaughtered or the locked door the critter wants to get through is opened the FPS goes back to normal. If possible, I'd try to plug the breach completely so there isn't any path at all in the hope that this would restore the FPS. The campers are probably a lost cause, though, and you'll probably have to take the fight to them (I've offed a couple of camping clowns down in the circus itself, using a ballista at a safe distance). Cave-ins can also be used, either to crush them or to lock them in so you can get close enough to engineer a new one to crush them with.

[Robsoie]

On my fort, at some point of my 42.04 fort existence my game became basically so atrociously slow that it was suddenly unplayable.

I looked at every creatures on the map and found out what was the problem .
There was a pack of "naked mole dogs" waiting in front of one of my closed doors in the caverns. The doors had animal passage forbidden.

As soon as i re-enabled animal passage from that door, the framerate suddenly went back at being much more playable.
It's a horrible pathfinding bug, 'im waiting for the tracker to come back online to post the save i kept.

So check in case you have any door with animal passage disabled, and re-enable them.

And in case your demons are not blocked by a door, once the bug tracker is back i recommend you post report with the save on the bug tracker, pathfinding is often a source of those frustrating "FPS death" and every report and save that can help Toady in figuring out the problem should be helpful.

[PatrikLundell]

@Robsoie: I believe the blocked door FPS draining bug is already on the bug tracker, so check carefully before posting a new one. If you find it, you may want to check if more saves are needed, though.

[Robsoie]

will check once the tracker is back.

[Melting Sky]

As others have mentioned FPS death often seems to be pathing bug related. Fliers have always had some serious pathing issues which is likely a big part of the problem with clowns causing a big FPS hit. If a goblin siege shows up with flying mounts weird things can happen as well. Oddly enough even if you completely cut off their ability to path into your fort you will likely still suffer some permanent fps drop from the circus breach. I think the pathing bugs involve some sort of looping logic problem where once it gets started it's not easy to break out of it beyond perhaps destroying the offending units. I've personally found that understanding how pathing algorithms work and designing your fort with this in mind helps tremendously in the long run battle vs fps death. The way we would intuitively build a fortress for real world people to move through and the way a simulated dwarf goes about doing it are often a bit different.

As far as pathing nightmares go the worst designs I have found are those you sometimes find in the caverns naturally which are long branching and lopping vertical and horizontal spaghetti messes particularly with fluids running through them and large numbers of fliers trying to navigate them.

Things you could try include walling off the HFS permanently, and or building another path for them to reach the surface or your fort with. Path finding seems to have the most trouble on the vertical axis so keep that in mind.

[Mr Frog]

As far as pathing nightmares go the worst designs I have found are those you sometimes find in the caverns naturally which are long branching and lopping vertical and horizontal spaghetti messes particularly with fluids running through them

[emphasis mine] This is actually quite relevant; I had been obsidianising the magma around the top of the spire, and quite a bit of water was still sloshing around the top both times I tried to penetrate it, which in turn resulted in said water pouring down the tube while the demons were attempting to path up it. I was sure the problem resulted from them all trying to head up the same 1x1 stairwell, but in retrospect that could also have easily broken something.

[PatrikLundell]

Flowing fluids result in a bit of an FPS effect, but that ends when the fluids stop flowing. One problem with pathing and fluids is that they tend to vary in depth, so one second a dorf can ford the water while the depth is 3/7, but the next tick the depth has risen to 4/7 and crossing is no longer possible. Clowns do not seem to care much about fluids, however (although I guess snow based ones can't handle magma...).

[Mr Frog]

Flowing fluids result in a bit of an FPS effect, but that ends when the fluids stop flowing. One problem with pathing and fluids is that they tend to vary in depth, so one second a dorf can ford the water while the depth is 3/7, but the next tick the depth has risen to 4/7 and crossing is no longer possible. Clowns do not seem to care much about fluids, however (although I guess snow based ones can't handle magma...).

My concern is that the flowing water may have knocked some of the clowns around, which might have borked their pathing somehow (I guess? I dunno). Both times I pierced the spire, everything was fine until the clowns hit the top of the tube where the water was coming in. Then my FPS abruptly died.

Also worth mentioning: not all of the clowns appeared to be causing trouble. When I tried pausing the game and hitting one-step repeatedly, some of the clowns could move without causing any undue lag at all, whereas at other times it would take the game upwards of 5 seconds to process a single tick (of course since there were upwards of 100 clowns trying to come up, I couldn't immediately figure out exactly which one(s) were causing the trouble).