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[Retro]

Getting back to the original question in this post (though the other tips are far more useful for FPS boosts), I'm running a test of vaporizing 50k+ stone right now to see how much of a boost it gives. I'll updated as soon as my [SPEED:0] dwarves finish moving it.

Using [SPEED:0] actually decreases your framerate a bit due to the severe increase in pathfinding (although your dwarves still move way faster despite this) - if you want the FPS difference to be an accurate depiction of a regular fort, best to turn it off before vaporization.

[Barrow]

Sounds good, thanks for the tip.

[Hyndis]

If you're going to vaporize it by changing the raws you don't need to do any hauling at all. Just vaporize it all in place.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, there's another really good way to boost your FPS that hasn't been discussed too much:

Idling.

Dwarves that, for one reason or another, are not pathing very much are not going to be contributing to that whole pathfinding cost problem.  This means that dwarves that do nothing but sit in a meeting zone chatting will not be pathing very much, and will therefore not use much CPU power in determining where they are going.  Dwarves that are doing tasks like working pumps or repeatedly flicking levers or otherwise simply standing in place while they do their work will use less CPU power, and boost your FPS.

Pure hauling tasks, especially when you are sending many dwarves through narrow hallways where they are forced to repeatedly try to path around obstructing dwarves or objects, will significantly decrease your FPS.  Frankly, in the first post, where the guy talks about how atom smashing lowered his FPS, I think this might be the problem:  Pathing a dwarf to a point, then over to another point through a narrow hallway takes up some resources, but it starts taking up many more resources when that dwarf then has to keep bumping into, and figuring out ways around every single other dwarf (and pet following those dwarves) in the fort because you are sending everyone out on a hauling mission.

[Retro]

Easier than idling: Cull dwarves you don't need. Seriously. If they're not doing anything, you don't need them. Personally I don't believe in having idlers except for rather unique situations.

[Barrow]

Going from 50k stones to 10k (all of which forbidden, so hopefully not a pathing issue) using an atom smasher jumped my FPS from 29 to 33. Not a huge boost, and there are easier ways to gain FPS, but it did seem to make some difference.

Time to revert the save so I can keep all my building materials. 

[forsaken1111]

It really isn't proper dwarven science until you involve a cat, magma, and a ridiculously complex contraption.

[sjaakwortel]

Time to Atom smash that cat 

[Zalminen]

Another simple way to improve FPS loss caused by pathfinding is to change the init option PATH_COST:1:2:5:25 to 1:1:5:25.

The default settings cause the pathfinding algorithm to often search a huge amount of extra squares as it keeps searching for a "high traffic" route to destination.
(The details were somewhere in the huge PathFinder thread...)

[Srial]

Going from 50k stones to 10k (all of which forbidden, so hopefully not a pathing issue) using an atom smasher jumped my FPS from 29 to 33. Not a huge boost, and there are easier ways to gain FPS, but it did seem to make some difference.

Time to revert the save so I can keep all my building materials. 

Now that's a great test.  Thanks for doing it!

As an update since I started this.  using all the great ideas in this and linked threads I took my 13 fps fort and did the following.

1) turned off weather - I would turn off temperature but the whole point of this fort is to build a magma defense
2) destroyed the remaining 5k unwanted stone
3) used all my 1000 or so blocks to build a giant reservoir I hope to fill with lava one day
4) slaughtered 38 of the 43 critters in my fort, leaving 2 claimed pets and the 3 war dogs that I use to detect thieves

And my fps went up to 21-23, which compared to the 13, is pretty decent.

Then I got a siege which dropped my fps to 12 or so, but my brave axedwarf core went out and wiped out all the invaders without an injury (fortunately none of the invaders had bows).  That helped my fps bounce back up but in the middle of burning corpses/mining goblinite I got a 16 dwarf immigrant wave bringing my fortress up to 111 dwarves.   I believe I called it a night with my fps in the 14-16 range

I'm trying to see if I can get them to settle in and reclaim my fps.  They brought a lot of unclaimed animals with them I'm sending to my butcher core for processing and there's a bazillion bits of armor and cloth out there now from the invaders I want to atom smash.

[alway]

In d40 I dumped somewhere on the order of 16k stone into magma*, where they melted and were removed come season change. This gave a moderate FPS increase, but not all that much.

That said, I am planning on magma-cleansing the world (including the fort) every once in a while on my current fort to remove clutter. After all, there's mroe than just rocks to worry about, by several years in you end up with thousands of little odds and ends which are utterly useless, but kept around for one reason or another. For example, the extracted goblinite ore which you aren't bothering to process and is scattered across the map.

*By dumped in magma, I mean I dumped magma on them where they were mined out; hauling all that stone would take days

[Noble Digger]

It sometimes takes several seasons for magma to destroy stone via contact. This may be worse for certain types of stone due to specific heat settings. Personally, I think throwing things in the magma is a poor way to destroy them in terms of FPS recovery. Just crush 'em with a bridge, it's over instantly and leaves absolutely no trace except 1 tile which has "a dusting of xxxxx" for each type of stone you created.

[forsaken1111]

In d40 I dumped somewhere on the order of 16k stone into magma*, where they melted and were removed come season change. This gave a moderate FPS increase, but not all that much.

That said, I am planning on magma-cleansing the world (including the fort) every once in a while on my current fort to remove clutter. After all, there's mroe than just rocks to worry about, by several years in you end up with thousands of little odds and ends which are utterly useless, but kept around for one reason or another. For example, the extracted goblinite ore which you aren't bothering to process and is scattered across the map.

*By dumped in magma, I mean I dumped magma on them where they were mined out; hauling all that stone would take days

Magma isn't going to do much to remove the goblin's iron armor from your map is it?

[katyrnyn]

Interesting thread.

I've also been doing FPS tests as of late, primarily after I noticed atom smashing 5k stone and other garbage had a negligible effect on FPS with a ~60 dwarf/10 cat/4x4 embark fort.  (In 40d I'd get about 10 FPS back from atom-smashing on average, now, on 31.08 I recover about 3-4.)  I'm less interested in FPS lost to pathing (as that should be reasonably constant if the number of dwarfs and animals stay the same), and more curious about the "FPS Drain = [some constant] times (Fortress Age)" effect.  (I find the game to be unplayable around 25-30....  That 4x4 embark was down to 15.)

So I embarked on a 2x2 map, set the FPS max to 400 and observed the following over two tests:

[A brief note on the FPS at the start of game: Nothing spectacular, but with minimal changes to the real estate I was getting around 240 FPS unpaused, I think.  I didn't make note of it as things were flying by and I often had to drop the FPS manually down to ~100.]


Control Point (start of experiments), Year 3 (3012, for the record): 23 dwarfs, 5 cats (but one pesky immigrant female cat), ~180 FPS average.  Invaders turned off.  Caverns not breached.  Large stockpile of booze and prepared meals, enough to last ~3 years (estimate).


A: Control Experiment: What is the effect on FPS with zero changes to the fort over the course of two years.

Details of Experiment: I stopped producing everything.  No new items, no digging, no engraving, no food, no farming.  The only "new" things were the crap dragged to my fort by caravans (and promptly dragged back), two new dwarf babies, and seven kitten skulls.  Some stone smoothing was going on, but again no engraving.  No pathing changes.  Nothing.  Lots of bored, idle, and drunk dwarfs.  No extra untied animals (only 4 war dogs chained at strategic points and the 5 wandering felines).

Result: At the end of two years my FPS was hovering around 95 unpaused, and sometimes dropped as low as 75 (for no observable reason, except possibly early caravan calculations).  I occasionally reach 110, but not for long.


B: Active Fort Experiment: Standard 1:1 production items only (ie: rock instruments, rock blocks, etc).  No farming.  Again, no cooking.  No "assembling" reactions where multiple items become one.  Otherwise same as the control experiment, except dwarfs are not idle and are pathing to/from their jobs (mostly dumping stone).

Result: Identical response as Control.  ~95 FPS unpaused after 2 years.  Sometimes 110, sometimes 75.  2 fewer kitten skulls.


Extremely small sample size so far, but I'm going to repeat a few times until I can get a design down that is survivable on my system with more than a few dozen dwarfs.  I'd really like to be able to play 120+ dwarf forts again, and unless I can find some "cause" for what's killing my FPS I might just have to mark that off as an impossible dream.  I've tried revising my fortress "flow" using "ramps," and other suggestions already covered in this topic with minimal results (My forts were fairly efficient to begin with).  Likewise with atom-smashing, as I already mentioned.

As far as I can tell there's nothing we're doing that specifically causes the FPS drain.  But again, this is so far an extremely small sample.


(And for the record: After tweaking everything in 2010 for optimal settings I get about 2/3 to 1/2 of the FPS as I did in 40d at ~60 dwarfs and identical fort layouts.  Obviously there have been world and code changes, and there's about 400% more matter under the ground, but that doesn't explain the age-related FPS drain I experience.  All experiments on a Windows 7 Pro box, 3.0 GHz Intel Pentium-D w/ 4 GB of 533 MHz DDR2 RAM [not that DF sees more than 2 or Windows more than ~3.2], 800 MHz Bus, and an ATI Radeon HD 4800 display adapter.  Hard Disks are 7200 RPM of varying structures and formats, DF might be living on one of the drives that's split Linux and, other, but nothing has changed there.)

[moosecow]

I've also observed changing very little over a forts lifetime still causes it to eventually grind to a halt. Perhaps removing items doesn't actually remove them internally or so?