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[JimiD]

I heard pitting animals was bad for FPS, as are still available for testing if they can path anywhere.
Chaining animals is better.
Caging better still.
Killing best of all.

But thats just what I understand.

I have a real problem with FPS and an old machine.

I use small embarks, limit myself to 80 odd dwarves, which still means seiges.

And consider setting serveral layer stones to boil at 10,000.  This may require a forum search for how to do, but it massively reduces the amount of stone kicking around, which helps too.  Do this at the outset, not half way through a game, other wise you will lose any furniture, goods and artifacts which are made from, or include these stones.

[sunshaker]

It might be worth exploring a minimalist set up as well, I'm not sure it would help, but it would be a lot less information for the game to track (which should make it faster).

1 Stone type for each Layer (plus Obsidian)
1 ore type for each metal (limit metals to say Copper, Iron/Steel, Silver, Gold, Bronze)
No unused Mineral Stones (if it has a point in the reaction keep it if not toss it)
1 type of coal
1-3 gems of each value level
1 Sand Soil 1 other Soil
Limit Weapons, armor and clothing (1 of each type, armor/clothing that covers most or all body layers)
Going to the extreme
1 size 3-4 herbivore, 1 size 9-10 herbivore
1 size 3-4 predator, 1 size 8-9 predator
3 above ground plants, 3 below ground plants
limit domestic animals to Dog, generic small animal (pig/sheep/goat/whatever), generic large animal (cow), generic pack/mount/pull animal (horse/donkey/mule/llama/camel/muskox), some kind of neutered (doesn't breed) vermin hunter (cat/terrier/mongoose/ferret). If you feel like splurging you could do cave version as well.
1 humanoid creature (say a generic beastman that lives everywhere)
1 large river fish, 1 large ocean fish, 3ish vermin fish
1 opponent race (combine goblins and kobolds)
1 type of demon (plus demon lord)
1 type of mega beast

[Fedor]

So, I just killed nearly 150 dwarves, of which 1/5'th were children and babies. Due to my fps getting under 20.

Until recently, I also had a Pentium 4 CPU.  Had TERRIBLE problems with framerate; abandoned every interesting fort I ever built because of it.

With a Pentium 4 @ 3.2 GHz you have a little more headroom than I did, but not much more.  You need to carefully balance the following:

1.  Magma and water.  When they flow, they chew up CPU time.  Don't get too fancy with either.

2.  Temperature.  Among the biggest CPU sinks around.  If you insist on keeping temperature on, then you need to play small forts only.

3.  Size and topography of fortress site.  Lower your embark size down to  4x4 (and 3x3 would be a good idea if you combine magma and temperature).  Steep elevation changes increase the total number of z-levels on your map, which also hurts framerate.

4.  Number of dwarves and pets.  Depending on the choices you make above, you will have to limit your population more or less stringently.   Try capping population at 80 and keeping pet numbers very small.

5.  As mentioned by others, complex pathfinding (as through narrow corridors and large fortresses) and object accumulation (such as loose rock) progressively degrade your framerate.  With your CPU, you just don't have the headroom to make vast constructions.  Be inventive in less space and with less stuff.

[Retro]

1.  Magma and water.  When they flow, they chew up CPU time.  Don't get too fancy with either.

As an additional note, if you do decide to use fluids in your fort, do your best to get them to full 7/7 levels with no 6/7s floating around. A 7/7 pool technically doesn't move around and thus eats up no extra processing power. If you really want to get specific with lesser water amounts, you can fill a pool to mostly 2/7s and use a bucket brigade and micromanagement to fill it to exactly 3/7 across the board or something, which likewise stops eating your FPS.

[shadow_slicer]

I heard pitting animals was bad for FPS, as are still available for testing if they can path anywhere.
Chaining animals is better.
Caging better still.
Killing best of all.

Pitting is actually not too terribly bad for FPS. The Pathfinding code implements a simple connectivity map, so the animals can almost immediately determine that they can't get to where ever they want to go.

What's bad for FPS is if you use tightly closed doors (not locked doors) to keep the animals in. The problem is the animals use the same connectivity map as dwarves so they think they can get somewhere, find a path, walk to the door, get interupted, and then repeat to infinity as the frame rate approaches zero.

Put all animals into a tiny pit. No exit out of there, just a little pit, like a dried up pond works fine. They will continue to breed in there but stay confined and don't path very far.

about that, wouldn't cats just try to path to the nearest vermin and always fail. wouldn't that burden your CPU even more?

It doesn't matter if the pathing fails, the CPU will retry every step anyway, IIRC every step the program calculates your whole fortress. Putting the animals in a pit makes their pathfinding each step a lot simpler because there are no different paths to calculate.

It's not because the paths are different, it's because they can determine immediately that their destination is inaccessible and give up without calculating a path. (also, the path calculation doesn't "calculate your whole fortress". For each path it only tests the tiles that could possibly be part of the shortest path to the destination (using the A* algorithm).

Nah, Native 64 bit support isn't going to do much.

I disagree. 64-bit mode more than doubles the number of general purpose registers available (from ~6 to ~16). This can significantly speed up CPU limited code, since the processor spends a lot less time reading and writing temporary data to memory. Unless your system is limited by the graphics, I would expect a 10% increase in speed from this alone.

Still, in the end, the pathfinding code is just going to need to be improved upon, Bottom Line.

Agreed

[Kitpup]

You know, I've been having framerate issues myself and I've been following all the advice here. I have a 4x4 map, I turned off temp, I have an utterly flat map, open layout... and I'm struggling with a 10fps (with spikes up to 50 o.O) from embark...

[Nether]

So, I just killed nearly 150 dwarves, of which 1/5'th were children and babies. Due to my fps getting under 20.

Until recently, I also had a Pentium 4 CPU.  Had TERRIBLE problems with framerate; abandoned every interesting fort I ever built because of it.

With a Pentium 4 @ 3.2 GHz you have a little more headroom than I did, but not much more.  You need to carefully balance the following:

1.  Magma and water.  When they flow, they chew up CPU time.  Don't get too fancy with either.

2.  Temperature.  Among the biggest CPU sinks around.  If you insist on keeping temperature on, then you need to play small forts only.

3.  Size and topography of fortress site.  Lower your embark size down to  4x4 (and 3x3 would be a good idea if you combine magma and temperature).  Steep elevation changes increase the total number of z-levels on your map, which also hurts framerate.

4.  Number of dwarves and pets.  Depending on the choices you make above, you will have to limit your population more or less stringently.   Try capping population at 80 and keeping pet numbers very small.

5.  As mentioned by others, complex pathfinding (as through narrow corridors and large fortresses) and object accumulation (such as loose rock) progressively degrade your framerate.  With your CPU, you just don't have the headroom to make vast constructions.  Be inventive in less space and with less stuff.

Thanks, will try.

Seems fairly unlikely that he'd have a dx10-capable videocard mated to a really old CPU. Not impossible, just not very likely.

Well thank you for calling my pc old 

[Fedor]

You know, I've been having framerate issues myself and I've been following all the advice here. I have a 4x4 map, I turned off temp, I have an utterly flat map, open layout... and I'm struggling with a 10fps (with spikes up to 50 o.O) from embark...

Need more information.  If you provide links to your fort and your init.txt file, and give us specs on your CPU and RAM, we should be able to troubleshoot.