Massive slowdown

[PowerWyrm]

What I normally do is clear the first level of the Trollmires, and head to the Old Forest for some risky power leveling.

The Old Forest is always laggy due to the rain effect. Try another dungeon to see if the lag persists. For me, the lag persists in all dungeons.

[Zop]

I finally was able to live for more than an hour, and I have a bit more to report. Once the stuttering becase nearingly unplayable (one second delays) after venturing down the Old Forest five levels or so, I found that the Task Explorer was not always reporting drops in RAM usage during/after these delays. However, the program never returned near my previously mentioned 131MB. The lagging was worst above 220MB. I'm venturing a guess that the garbage collector is having a harder time freeing memory for some reason.

I saved\quit to the main menu and reloaded to find that everything was good again. I completed Old Forest, but the lag was starting to build again. I made it out and completed four other dungeons. I guess leaving OF also cut out the lagging that started to build. I don't think it's the rain, since I remember this since before it was added.

[Bladyn]

I have not tried Beta 17 yet, but in Beta 15b and in Beta 16 I get massive delay and the CPU usage goes to 50%+ during the initial part of Storming the City. Stays bad until the clouds are driven away, so I am guessing it is the Lightning effects.

[darkgod]

Yes the lightnings in Derth are a killer, I need to make them better

[Fredo]

v17 for the PC is running very slowly for me - with spikes of 50-70% processor utilization. However, v17 on OSX runs great. No idea what the difference is.

[Bladyn]

Yes the lightnings in Derth are a killer, I need to make them better

They are lovely effects though. They definitely look (to quote Ratatouille) "lightningy". Currently the performance pain significantly outweighs their coolness factor.

[PowerWyrm]

Here's a savefile to toy with:

http://www.humyo.fr/FMyXqZf/save.7z?a=mYQU5lxrXAg

Bottom Rak'Shor pride, cleared from all monsters. No vault on the level. Just moving around causes lag after a while, and it's periodic...

Any news on this?

[Bladyn]

Wow... Just stumbled into the "Dark Crypt". Also super slow... but I think it was due to a "Disease Cloud". Must be the animations.

[PowerWyrm]

AOE spells just add more slowness to the already slow game...

Alright... my current char is now at level 15 of the High Peak, and he can barely move. Running is out of question, as well as resting (window pops up and then freezes the game for almost a minute). Any monster casting AOE is probably a game ender...

I tried running the game in lower resolution (was using 1280x1024 fullscreen), in ASCII mode with all gfx effects disabled, and the game is still as slow. So it's clearly something in the game core...

Strangely, when checking memory/CPU usage, they're never at 100%, so it's not a memory or CPU problem.

It seems that the slowdown becomes worse as you progress through the game (none early, annoying in the Far East, unbearable endgame). I'll try to remove all zone files except the High Peak (since the char is next to the final portal) and see if it changes something. Maybe it's class related (playing a Berserker... seems that many weapon checks are made even when doing nothing). More to follow...

[PowerWyrm]

No luck with the zone files

The savefile is still available here: http://www.humyo.fr/FMyXqZf/save.7z?a=mYQU5lxrXAg

[PowerWyrm]

The lag problem is still persistent in beta 19. This time, the slowdown appears immediately, not gradually. And it's periodic (ten seconds normal, ten seconds unplayable, ten seconds normal...)
It feels like the game engine is saving some internal state half of the time...

[darkgod]

Hum
This looks more like garbage collection going mad to me.

Can you open your agme/modules/tome/class/Game.lua file, locate the function _M:onTurn() and add as the first line:

Code: Select all

	print("=====MEMORY USED=====", collectgarbage("count"))

Then rune the game, your stdout should log memory usage, try to monitor it in realtime (there are ways on windows, not sure how :/) and see if a big memory decrease is correlated with the lags

[PowerWyrm]

Alright... here are some results:

1) No lag
=====MEMORY USED===== 46951.337890625
...
=====MEMORY USED===== 93782.811523438
24 frames in 1.034 seconds = 23.2108 FPS (33 keyframes)

2) Starting to experience lag
=====MEMORY USED===== 94349.346679688
...
=====MEMORY USED===== 96044.959960938
8 frames in 1.079 seconds = 7.41427 FPS (11 keyframes)
=====MEMORY USED===== 96616.260742188
...
=====MEMORY USED===== 97182.209960938
3 frames in 1.127 seconds = 2.66193 FPS (13 keyframes)

3) Lag peak
=====MEMORY USED===== 98468.259765625
=====MEMORY USED===== 97772.870117188
=====MEMORY USED===== 96996.576171875
11 frames in 1.006 seconds = 10.9344 FPS (49 keyframes)
26 frames in 1.041 seconds = 24.976 FPS (72 keyframes)
=====MEMORY USED===== 70646.15625
=====MEMORY USED===== 70223.475585938
=====MEMORY USED===== 45296.963867188

4) No more lag
=====MEMORY USED===== 45297.893554688
19 frames in 1.034 seconds = 18.3752 FPS (23 keyframes)
=====MEMORY USED===== 45864.186523438
...

This can be reproduced everytime:
- low memory usage: no lag
- memory reaches 94k: lag starts
- memory reaches 98k then starts to decrease: lag spike
- memory back to low level: no more lag

This is even more visible when dropping stuff from the inventory:

=====MEMORY USED===== 86144.056640625
18 frames in 1.046 seconds = 17.2084 FPS (23 keyframes)
22 frames in 1.033 seconds = 21.2972 FPS (39 keyframes)
[LOG] Fire*Wolf drops on the floor: #FFFFFF#iron mace (6.5-9.1 power, 2 apr)#LAST#.
7 frames in 1.351 seconds = 5.18135 FPS (10 keyframes)
=====MEMORY USED===== 48205.278320313

[PowerWyrm]

Any idea how to solve this memory problem?

[Fizanko]

in case there's something usefull for the report :


and i do not play using an online profile, just strictly offline.

I can confirm that beta19 like beta18 (only discovered Tome4 at beta18) movement and battle can be very smooth at time, but at other time they can be stuttering very heavily, even when they're not involving any particles for spell effects.

It can happen even on zone that have been cleaned of monsters, sometime just moving around a cleared level can produce those slowdowns too sometime (not always, that's why it is difficult to find a pattern).

I too observed same as PowerWyrm that droping items from the inventory create a slowdown too leading into a very delayed response of the engine, as after dropping something, the game seems to wait for +/- 4 or 5 seconds before the user can do anything else.

In Beta18 i played a berzerker up to level 42 and didn't observed an increase of those stuttering the more quest i completed, even after lots of quests completed, exploring a dungeon can always be either perfectly smooth or barely playable without me understanding why.

I have not yet gone far in Beta19, but until now it seems similar to Beta18 in term of those unexplainable (for me as i know nothing about the code) slowdowns