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[Psieye]

But it made me chuckle a bit after I was quite frustrated that my recent fortress was eradicated while I was trying to pierce the aquifer and my last adventurer got both his arms cut off by thieves. Sometimes it helps to know that there are people out there who waste their time witn stuff much more pointless than I do.

I smell a troll... Smells like onions and unwashed hair.

No I smell something similar but not quite troll - someone who needed a quick frustration-dump and thought this thread would do the job. Well ok, that he then spoke his thoughts pretty much makes him a troll.

Caverns have stuff happening in them regardless of whether they have been revealed or not.  In fact, revealing the caverns after 5 years or so can result in caverns that have been almost completely taken over by fungal trees and underground crop shrubs. 

Crundle packs and Giant Cave Spiders will fight it out even if you never know, as will FBs and any hidden cave civ, and there is a reason the caverns will be covered in cave spider webs when you open them for the first time. 

HFS is the only thing where nothing spawns or moves until you reveal it, and HFS produces MASSIVE lag if you reveal and then seal it. 

Hmm, I might decide to make a new world based on the fork save's raws to eliminate caverns and as much of the surface vegetation as possible.

[Meansdarling]

Posting to watch.
I hope you discover the cause. Reading about all this is very interesting.

[rtg593]

Post to watch as well. I've had several forts die of fps, and it's normally after I've mined out a massive area. Lost about 100 fps off the last one, started dropping when I began digging out a 140z pillar, settled at 30 fps when I finished it. Abandoned cuz I couldn't handle it going so slow :p

Also, my pocket world's stay at at a considerably higher framerate for much longer than my large, or largest worlds. Not to mention the autosaves being only a few seconds, vs a minute for the largest :p

Cool stuff:)

[schismatise]

But sealing off that newly opened space doesn't really increase framerate. I doubt the pathing engine is so stupid as to check places it can't possibly reach, so pathing is not the (most significant) cause of increased lag with mined out areas, and not a cause at all for sealed ones.

Besides, increased map size wouldn't cause issues if map tiles themselves didn't eat up CPU. Remove all flying units and check again if you're worried that too is pathing. On top of that, I do think it safe to assume non-revealed tiles cause less issues than revealed ones (no reason to to temperature checks/etc), so it could very well be a major source of FPS drain on older forts.

My experience is inconsistent with this.

A few forts ago, i had a massive, around 100 z-level tall 3rd cavern layer. I pierced it at about 6 different points at varying heights, in order to reveal it completely so i could build around it. My FPS started dying horribly even after the first piercing, and continued to get worse. Then i sealed up all the holes i made, and my FPS slowly returned to normal. No noticable difference. This happened over a period of maybe 1 game month, not too long.

I did notice, however, that simply viewing the cavern i had now revealed still gave me huge amounts of lag. As soon as i hotkeyed back to the surface, lag was gone. I found this rather strange, as i had not really noticed it before, but since then i have paid attention to this, and it seems to remain true - scrolling down the z-levels of every fort since then, my FPS drops while looking through the significantly large caverns (30+ z-levels).

Also, posting to watch.

Edit: It may be worth noting that every hole i made in the caverns was above the floor level of that area - ie. there was never an accessable path into the caverns for my dwarves. Obviously any flying creatures in the cavern (can't say i noticed any specifically) would have had full access to my fort.

[o_O[WTFace]]

Revealed tiles seem to cause some amount of lag even if no stone is produced and no one tries to path through them.

Also, my pocket world's stay at at a considerably higher framerate for much longer than my large, or largest worlds. Not to mention the autosaves being only a few seconds, vs a minute for the largest :p

Other people have reported this too.  If worldgen information is causing slowdowns then tracked events that occur in forts would cause lag as well, which might explain some of the issues caused by sieges and caravans. 

[NW_Kohaku]

OK, so I just checked before going to sleep, and found that DF was actually responding again, so I thought that maybe I had actually managed to destroy all those darn boulders, and was looking at a result...

I wasn't.  I still have 890,000 boulders left to go, this was just a few frames where nobody was actually destroying boulders.

This was after 5 hours, so the boulder-destroying process appears as if it will take roughly three days of non-stop processing.

But it's at a point where I can save and try again with some different types of reactions to see if I can reduce the problems.

EDIT:
This is game-killing lag, here. 

Even setting this to only search for one stone to destroy at a time, this is murderously slow.  This isn't just tapping "q" or "t", I think the game is actually looking through a list of every stone in the fort per stone I am slated to destroy, resulting in a 5-hour long frame when the dwarves are looking at the locations of all 1,000,000 stones 10,000 times in a row for every individual stone to see which stone is closest. 

[Kogut]

Tangentially related: I have a save that's right before a huge FPS drop that I can't pinpoint the cause of. It seems to be based on time of the year. Should I toss it on the bug tracker?

Maybe - but what happens during this time (the best answer - nothing changes but FPS is lower)? Probably you may try, maybe it will be a good enough to find what is wrong.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'll keep the super-contraction-test for a possible bug report on the way in which reaction object claiming works.  Surely that can be optimized.

I'm basically forced now to restart this with a much smaller (130,000) test sample, which may not provide the same amount of data, but won't involve my computer exploding trying to calculate what is going on. 

I also put a product into the reaction - a single mug per hundred boulders destroyed.  If my earlier speculation about keeping an array open if there is just one item still in it is true, then this will be what keeps the game lagging more than the initial state.

[NW_Kohaku]

Contraction Experiments on DFFD

I would like to have other people try running the End State and the Control versions of the save for a long period of time (like a year or so), and record what they see in terms of average FPS.

I think I got a result, but the FPS bounces around seasonally, so I want more observations to be more certain.

[Kogut]

Without access to the source.
Which you will never have.

Trollfeeding but I was unable to resist: It is called black-box testing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-box_testing

[Hotaru]

Hm,

I admit I'm not good with computers. I tried reading DFHack's source code but couldn't get the answer.

But, how does the game, being able to use only a finite amount of RAM, store a boundless amount of items, etc? Does it write to hard disk, or does it wait for more memory to become available?

Thanks for this awesome thread, by the way. You're a genius.

[Kogut]

But, how does the game, being able to use only a finite amount of RAM, store a boundless amount of items, etc? Does it write to hard disk, or does it wait for more memory to become available?

Amount of items is not boundless but limited. It is hard to hit this limit as increasing amount of items is resulting in lower FPS, resulting in FPS death.

[Hotaru]

But, how does the game, being able to use only a finite amount of RAM, store a boundless amount of items, etc? Does it write to hard disk, or does it wait for more memory to become available?

Amount of items is not boundless but limited. It is hard to hit this limit as increasing amount of items is resulting in lower FPS, resulting in FPS death.

Yes, I understand. The reason why I ask is, both the game waiting for memory becoming available and having to write to HD would probably result in exactly the game slowing down a lot.

I've actually been theorizing that that's the cause, because the game seems to run with excellent speed on my laptop with a SSD compared to another computer of similar processor and RAM but 5400 RPM HD. Unless I'm just imagining it.

[Kogut]

But, how does the game, being able to use only a finite amount of RAM, store a boundless amount of items, etc? Does it write to hard disk, or does it wait for more memory to become available?

Amount of items is not boundless but limited. It is hard to hit this limit as increasing amount of items is resulting in lower FPS, resulting in FPS death.

Yes, I understand. The reason why I ask is, both the game waiting for memory becoming available and having to write to HD would probably result in exactly the game slowing down a lot.

I've actually been theorizing that that's the cause, because the game seems to run with excellent speed on my laptop with a SSD compared to another computer of similar processor and RAM but 5400 RPM HD. Unless I'm just imagining it.

It is likely as operating system will use hard drive as RAM (way, way slower) if RAM is completely used.

[Kogut]

In my current test (create object, destroy object with [SPEED:0] dwarves) I see a constant FPS drop, from 4500 to 3000. I will try to reproduce it again (without changes to RAWs during game, with disabled internet and antivirus etc), maybe we will see proper bug report.

I am unable to reproduce this problem, now I will try with checking whatever list of dead units is eating FPS.