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[Pan]

I'm starting a new embark and feel that I really want to have a fort that lasts longer than 7 years. FPS usually dies at that time, and I'm going to do all I can in this embark to save FPS. I have modded out most clothing, and will be using a USB stick to transfer the game from my mac (faster) to PC to do a dfclean every so often. I'm also planning to cage all animals, butcher some, set children limit to very little, kill useless dwarves, and turn off the weather. I'll also attempt to use traffic zones. Dwarven pop limit is at 95. All goblinite is to be melted, their clothes traded off, and spare stone atom smashed or turned into tradeable crafts.

All in all, most of the above were everything that was mentioned in the FPS saving page on the wiki. Is there anything else I should know about?

 And is it true that glaciers save FPS due to their barren landscape? By that logic, do deserts also save FPS (found a mountain bordering a desert with a stream, shallow metals and flux, so I sure hope deserts do save FPS)?

[zehive]

7 years until your fps dies?

dude thats insane, by year 3 or 4 my forts take 2-3 hours to go through a single year.

[The Dog Delusion]

I've found that the embark size makes a huge difference. 2x2 for sure, unless you're planning on using a utility to do something crazy like a 1x1 embark.

[Pan]

When I play DF on my Windows computer (I seldom do), the FPS also dies at year 2 or 3. That's why I use the mac, which has some major drawbacks of it's own (no utilities and needing to pack mods and graphics myself sometimes).

I'm going to be doing a 3*3 embark.

[Crashmaster]

Reducing the cavern layers to 1 when you gen the world will help as well I hear.

[thegoatgod_pan]

dfclean for all the random blood deposits is another lifesaver, so is turning off temperature and weather (temperature is obviously too fun to give up for some forts, but weather almost always can go in exchange for a good boost).

[zehive]

used dfclean and autodump (into magma) to clean up my fort a bit. raised my FPS up from like, 10 to 22. I gave DF a higher CPU affinity and FPS went up considerably as well

[Pan]

Reducing the cavern layers to 1 when you gen the world will help as well I hear.

Ah yeah, that as well. Thanks 

[CriticallyAshamed]

I was under the assumption that even when removed from the game (atom smashing or trading) stones still caused lagged?

[Pan]

... I sure hope not. If the stone is no longer in the game, then why should they cause lag?

[Manic Typist]

...I gave DF a higher CPU affinity and FPS went up considerably as well

How do you do that?

[dwarfhoplite]

Number of caves, height of embark. i have 17levels before magma layer and 3 levels above ground, and no caves. this setup gives me fps of 90 at 90 dorfs

[zehive]

...I gave DF a higher CPU affinity and FPS went up considerably as well

How do you do that?

either in the init, or much more simply open task manager, go to processes, and change priority to highest.

i misspoke when i said affinity

[0x517A5D]

All goblinite is to be melted, their clothes traded off, and spare stone atom smashed or turned into tradeable crafts.

I suggest atom-smashing the clothing and stone, not trading it.  I had a fort where I made tons and tons of goods.  It nearly died from slow FPS, until I smashed all of those goods and got a 6x speedup.

For trade goods, I suggest rock mechanisms made from valuable ore.   That, or meals made from quarry bushes.

[Jurph]

Make your fortress super-dense and use traffic zones, and you'll greatly reduce the cost of pathfinding.  Here are some things I've done that can help...

• Use a vertical stack of 15x15-tile squares (or 15-tile diameter circles if you're feeling clever) with a central shaft; once you hit 15 floors you have a cube with excellent pathfinding qualities.
• Make the central shaft a high-traffic zone, and create a single tile high-traffic path from the stairs to each workshop.
• Make the corners of the square floors (or the outer 2-3 radial tiles if using circles) low-traffic zones to push dwarves to use storage closer to the core.
• Use cascading stockpiles so that each workshop's most useful inputs are delivered to the squares around a workshop by peons (so your high-value workers spend less time shuttling back and forth looking for raw materials)
• Place a forbidden door over the entrance to any exploratory shaft that is not currently in use -- this cuts all of that volume out of the search space.
• Designate a ten-tile-long, single-tile-wide hallway of "RESTRICTED" space pathing into the exploration mines so that any item available in the main fortress will be found by A* before the algorithm starts to consider anything in the mines.
• Place a "base camp" just above each cavern layer that includes a tiny amount of food, booze, and a bed in a sealed dining/bedroom.  Send your exploratory miners down into the depths, turn off labors besides mining, and forbid the door behind them.  Open the base camp for business.

Basically your goal should be to minimize the search space for A* pathfinding, and wherever possible use traffic designations to help it seek the most likely spots.