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[koruth]

I've got a nice, stable, low-population fort going on right now.  I decided to challenge myself by turning immigration off and seeing how high I could get the population on births alone. 

Anyway, I've started working on an airlock gate for traders to get in, which I can seal off and flood really quickly in the event of raids.  I decided to go for good looks too, lots of statues, waterfalls, and suchlike inside of it.  The problem is, the waterfalls seem to be causing massive amounts of lag, disproportional to the amount of water being moved.  I've got about 6 waterfalls going right now (planned for much more) and they bog the game down to 30-odd fps.

I've followed the wiki's tips on lag hacks for the init file, turning off weather and all the like, and that bought me a stunning 2 fps extra speed.  I've got no animals in the castle, so it can't be a catsplosion, and the fort's a standard 6x6 (admittedly on the ocean, with a magma pipe but that never caused me trouble anytime during the development)  It's only got 13 dwarves right now, and I don't think there's any wild animals other than a few magma monsters, so it shouldn't be pathing eating me up.

I'm pretty certain it's not the pump-and-waterwheel assembly beneath the whole thing causing this.  I tried flooding the airlock, and once it filled to the point that the waterfalls disappeared, so did the lag, despite the fact that the pumps were still operating normally. 

Any way I can try and test which part of the waterfalls seem to be causing the lag?  Maybe a way to turn mist off, or some difference in the physics of the moving water that I can look for?  I'd like to help get the problem fixed, as I've grown rather fond of this fort and mega-project and wouldn't like to abandon either to lag.

[Footkerchief]

Yes, flowing water chews up CPU like nobody's business.  The volume of water isn't the issue per se -- a large waterfall could conceivably result in better performance than a smaller waterfall, depending on how the water was supplied and drained.  Basically, you want to ensure that flowing water remains at 7/7 as much as possible, which is hard.  The fact that you have 6 of them probably isn't helping.

Did you turn off temperature too?

[koruth]

That's just the thing though, I tried making a massive set of water circuits draining back into an aquifer much bigger than the current pumping set... No lag at all, and the water circuits beneath the airlock don't cause anything in the couple seconds it takes to pump to the waterfall point, and the couple of seconds it takes to flood once it's stopped falling.  It seems like it's specifically waterfalls.