Occasional heavy lag

Murphy · 2014-09-20T08:10:55.000Z

When walking there is occasionally a 5-10 second hangup. Presumably that’s new map pieces generating as I explore and it used to happen before, but it has become sharply more frequent now. Going to try and verify whether this ever happens travelling over already explored territory.

Linux curses version, Lubuntu 14.10.

jcd · 2014-09-20T10:26:41.000Z

experimental or stable?
also specs of your pc?

Murphy · 2014-09-20T11:44:36.000Z

Experimental. I’m not sure which specs you want. Pentium dual core processor, 3GHz, 2GB RAM.

jcd · 2014-09-20T12:10:22.000Z

well, i don’t know too much about cata performance-wise, and from what i hear from other people others (like me) complain a little while others find it very fast.

experimental is bound to be a little slower than stable.
also some map lag while loading is normal.

On my pc with dual-core @ 2.4Ghz i had severe lagging with experimentals when too many monsters/items were around.
What made it to go much faster for me, was compiling with the RELEASE=1 flag. (disabling some debug capability in the process)

here is the topic i made about it: http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=7597.msg175646

try that, or you can wait for a performance guy to answer you.

Murphy · 2014-09-20T13:37:51.000Z

It’s not that kind of lag. If one experimental version works fine but the next one is all laggy then something has happened.

Unfortunately I can’t figure out which version this started happening on (because I normally download a new experimental every few days and skip a few). I know I’ve downloaded release 2119 and it was laggy, then I tried 2122 and it is laggy too but 2093 wasn’t.

KA101 · 2014-09-20T21:25:13.000Z

I can confirm the occasional (non-overmap-gen) lag burst. Would guess something to do with monster-group processing or possibly the map-piece handler, but that’s just guessing.

Coolthulhu · 2014-09-21T09:48:51.000Z

I get infinitely less lag when debugging after I use the command to kill all monsters.
One thing I don’t understand is how does the lag get transfered underground - isn’t basement level underground mostly devoid of monsters?

For those actually interested who are running a OS that works nicely with GCC and friends (ie. not Windows):
Compiling the binary with -pg and then profiling it with gprof should give a lot of hints on what is causing the lag.

RogueEsp · 2014-09-21T23:35:20.000Z

I don’t experience lag, both in experimental and stable… Well, the game freezes and unfreezes when my character sleeps. Does that count?

sradac · 2014-09-23T13:10:40.000Z

I started experiencing pretty noticeable lag in the recent versions of experimental ever since starting in Spring made you start in the snow. When im outside, the snow animations REALLY kills performance. intel i5, 8gb ram, integrated dell chipset 3100.

The strange thing is other weather animations like rain or acid rain dont hit my performance at all, its ONLY snow / flurries. I can help it a little bit by turning down the animation delay, but that makes other animations too fast for my liking.

I can obviously completely turn off animations, but the way you guys do rain in ascii is just so cool I would hate to lose it.

Murphy · 2014-10-10T22:52:02.000Z

The problem is still there. Looks like it only lags when I am near a town or another place with lots of monsters, but the lag is pretty significant. The game can freeze for 30-40 seconds (even the weather animation pauses).

My current guess is hordes, and it did begin around the time when new “distributed” hordes were implemented.