Factorio Forums

Hi

Me and a friend are running a bobs mods multiplayer game where I run as server.
We are running the latest beta release and are having ever increasing performance issues.

Long story short, we need help in identifying how to build a large base while maintaining acceptable performance.
What can we avoid/focus on to make this game playable?!

Im running a watercooled and overclocked I7, 16 gigs of fairly fast ram and a decent graphics card. I have about 30 FPS at the moment. (no CPU over 85% ever, which is strange)
Base is far from complete but we are running about 500 MW of constant power drain increasing fairly quickly. We estimate finished base will need about 6-8 GW of power to operate.
We are also running a train system to feed the base using siggboys combinator magick, so there are a fair amount of combinators on the map, and we are not afraid to use them for other stuff as well.

We have started to minimize belt usage since we heard tunneled belts use less CPU.
We are also trying to build direct insert factories to reduce belt usage.
We are not using god modules, but productivity and speed modules are used. Same with beacons.

Any other tips for what we can do to improve performance?

Two huge issues I have found is the production tab that murders performance, dropping it to sub 30 FPS each time, even when I had 60 FPS and the base was smaller.
Clicking on a train station in the main network will bring up a tab showing all the trains using it, we have 20+ trains and it will make my computer go unresponsive, can I disable that preview crap somehow?

The F4 debug menu has an option to show timings for how much time is spent on each part of processing, this should help you find out where your bottlenecks are.

Belts will be optimised in 0.15 I think, it's mainly the collision detection which is being reworked so shouldn't be a problem going forward.

A note about your CPU, Factorio only uses a certain number of threads and each thread makes up a % of your CPU, so it's not so much the number of threads you have but the speed of them. Having free processing time just means you have more threads in your CPU than Factorio uses which is good for OS performance.

Factorio gains some performance with faster RAM.

Deadly-Bagel wrote:The F4 debug menu has an option to show timings for how much time is spent on each part of processing, this should help you find out where your bottlenecks are.

Belts will be optimised in 0.15 I think, it's mainly the collision detection which is being reworked so shouldn't be a problem going forward.

A note about your CPU, Factorio only uses a certain number of threads and each thread makes up a % of your CPU, so it's not so much the number of threads you have but the speed of them. Having free processing time just means you have more threads in your CPU than Factorio uses which is good for OS performance.

Thanks for the tips, Im aware of the F4 menu but at work now so no screen possible atm.
However I have kept an eye on the mods and I see almost no CPU time spent on them.

Great news for 15.1, we do have quite some belts as you can imagine even though we try to minimize them.

When it comes to CPU my figure above is for my most utilized core. Even though Im running as many threads as possible Im not seing as much load on the other cores as I expected with most of em barely utilized (few over 10-20%). Im also surprised to see game speed degradation without ever hitting 100% on a single core, I guess there is some sort of partial downtime even for the most utilized core.

The only option for me to increase processing power further is to try and move the Factorio main process to one of the first cores and then to max OC on that one. But Im not sure I can do that.

ssilk wrote:Factorio gains some performance with faster RAM.

I do have some headroom here, Ill see if I can run them a bit faster later this week.

Did you tried disabling smoke?

Fug1t1v3 wrote:Did you tried disabling smoke?

this only remove the animation, not the smoke enteties beeing generated (solution: a mod which remove smoke entities completly (like UPS-up))

you seems todo alot already
only 2 think i could think of
1) performance wise its even better to use robots instead of unterground belts atm
2) mods: like UPS-up mod (depending if you play peacefull of or.. you can even disable pollution at all with it, which is a huge ups gain).. you can set different setting there

doxsroxs wrote:Two huge issues I have found is the production tab that murders performance, dropping it to sub 30 FPS each time, even when I had 60 FPS and the base was smaller.
Clicking on a train station in the main network will bring up a tab showing all the trains using it, we have 20+ trains and it will make my computer go unresponsive, can I disable that preview crap somehow?

If those two things give that much slowdown on your computer then that's a good indication that your graphics card can't keep up. What graphics card do you have?

Hi

Thanks for the tips, ill go ahead and try the UPS-up mod. Wont convert to a robot base at this moment since we decided to stick with belts and robot bases seem a bit boring to build tbh.
We do use robots for the central storage stations and some simple items that are not needed in quantity.

Current drain yesterday prior to crashing was moving between 600-700 MW. (we also run it all on coal, and will continue to do that... because we can!)

And we have had some performance issues related to train stations.
We have a rather large train network with a lot of trains and around 220 active stations. I have found that the game will completely lock up if I try to open a station to rename it and it has 20+ trains connected to it.
Probably due to trying to show minimaps and previews and all sorts of crap when opening the station. This needs a fix, unusable design at the moment.
Sometimes I have been able to open stations in the past, but now that we have grown more its a 100% lock each time I try. The computer just freezes and I have to force close Factorio. Before it would atleast wake up after a few seconds.

We also tried the undecorator mod, it actually raised FPS about 2 and reduced the savegame from 108 MB to 44 MB, so a huge bonus there. Hopefully there are more tweaks available in the UPS-up mod.

Please keep the tips coming, we want to build this base, but its not feasible without better performance from the game.

Checking the stats I currently have around 25-27 on Update.
Game update is around 20-22
Circuit networks around 3,6-3,8
Entity update ~14
CRC around 2,5
Electric network 1,3
Logistic manager 0,8
Trains, not so stable, between 0,2 and 4, guess thats the damn pathfinder. (and yes, its broken in multiple ways, including the chain signals and trains crashing despite correct signals in place, we have seen a few strange things)
Lua garbage is at 0,3
Script update 0,2-0,6
Only mod that is above 0,02 is:
Smart trains between 0,02 and 0,5 (seems to spike a bit when a train arrives to a station, most of the time its at 0,02)
The fat controller at 0,3-1,2 moving up and down
YARM mod is at 0,2 to 0,6
All of these are from the left most column, that I assume is the one to look at since it changes all the time. I have no idea what the right and middle columns mean.

Can provide screenshots if needed, but the text is hard to read due to size and general clutter in its setup.

Rseding91 wrote:

doxsroxs wrote:Two huge issues I have found is the production tab that murders performance, dropping it to sub 30 FPS each time, even when I had 60 FPS and the base was smaller.
Clicking on a train station in the main network will bring up a tab showing all the trains using it, we have 20+ trains and it will make my computer go unresponsive, can I disable that preview crap somehow?

If those two things give that much slowdown on your computer then that's a good indication that your graphics card can't keep up. What graphics card do you have?

Im sorry, but that makes no sense, when and where are those two tabs graphics intensive and please explain to me how that would be possible?

In case this is actually a valid question, I have a GTX 970 (dont have OC figures in my head, but its bumped up a few notches, still stable though).
I am actually looking to buy a new one soon, but to be honest. If it has any, and I mean ANY impact on game performance on those two tabs, then they are doing it wrong.
One is showing a collection of graphs and the other at most a huge number of map overviews centered on trains, none of which are actually graphic intensive in nature unless they are doing something really strange.

doxsroxs wrote:Im sorry, but that makes no sense, when and where are those two tabs graphics intensive and please explain to me how that would be possible?

In case this is actually a valid question, I have a GTX 970 (dont have OC figures in my head, but its bumped up a few notches, still stable though).
I am actually looking to buy a new one soon, but to be honest. If it has any, and I mean ANY impact on game performance on those two tabs, then they are doing it wrong.
One is showing a collection of graphs and the other at most a huge number of map overviews centered on trains, none of which are actually graphic intensive in nature unless they are doing something really strange.

I have the same graphics card as you and experience no such slowdown when I open those screens on any map I load up.

Please post your save file so I can look at it.

Rseding91 wrote:

doxsroxs wrote:Im sorry, but that makes no sense, when and where are those two tabs graphics intensive and please explain to me how that would be possible?

In case this is actually a valid question, I have a GTX 970 (dont have OC figures in my head, but its bumped up a few notches, still stable though).
I am actually looking to buy a new one soon, but to be honest. If it has any, and I mean ANY impact on game performance on those two tabs, then they are doing it wrong.
One is showing a collection of graphs and the other at most a huge number of map overviews centered on trains, none of which are actually graphic intensive in nature unless they are doing something really strange.

I have the same graphics card as you and experience no such slowdown when I open those screens on any map I load up.

Please post your save file so I can look at it.

Oups, sorry, I did not realize you are Factorio staff and most likely know what you are talking about.
But to be honest, it sounds completely crazy that the graphics card would be the bottleneck on those two screens, especially since my CPU power usage (and its cooling needs) go up quite a lot when looking at the production screen.
The train station screen just freezes everything until it either crashes or comes out of it. (these days its just crashing, and dropping players)

Ill get back to you tomorrow night with a download link, its very late here tonight and I need my beuty sleep.

Thanks for looking into this by the way, its awesome!

I was absently reading the top post but had to back up a little when I came across this one

Im running a watercooled and overclocked I7, 16 gigs of fairly fast ram and a decent graphics card. [...] Base is far from complete but we are running about 500 MW of constant power drain increasing fairly quickly.

Hi again

Sorry for the delay, had to much work this weekend and was sidetracked due to a complete meltdown of our automated train system.
Unfortunately this has ground the entire factory to a halt. On the positive side that gained me 5-10 fps, currently sitting at about 40 FPS.

I have added a rar file for mods and a current save file, I also added an older one where we sit at about 5-600 MW of power usage.
This is entirely dependent on how much production is active and how much mining we are doing, we have not even gotten our first rocket launched yet so no constant drain

The production tab performance issues is nonexisting now that the factory is not producing anything.
Where as it was quite noticable when production was high.
Im pretty sure the graphs or the data collection for the graphs are not very optimized.

When it comes to opening a station, I have tried it myself, and I can get through it without crashing if Im running solo with a few seconds standstill, its when people are connected that things just crash, not every time though.
From what I heard over TS each time I tried my friend got server not responding right away, and the crash frequency then went higher as we have been growing.

Rseding91, I have sent you a message with the download link, please let me know if it does not work for you.

luc wrote:I was absently reading the top post but had to back up a little when I came across this one

Im running a watercooled and overclocked I7, 16 gigs of fairly fast ram and a decent graphics card. [...] Base is far from complete but we are running about 500 MW of constant power drain increasing fairly quickly.

Im afraid my initial estimates are low, I had miscalculated power needs for the rocket launchers quite a lot, we will probably need waaay more power if we are to get close to the goal.
If needed we might sacrifice coal/oil based power and go nuclear, but that just feels... to clean!

Interesting. Your save has 35~ locomotives with 250+ entries in their schedule that are constantly switching between automatic and manual mode. That D.E.S.T.R.O.Y.S. performance in the Trains GUI.

I believe I can fix the issue but I found other issues with the Trains GUI that makes me want to take it to the chopping block and redesign how the internals work now that we know what all needs to be addressed in its inner workings

I drastically improved performance in the Trains GUI but didn't find anything interesting in the production stats. The production stats simply draws a lot of data for the graphs which can be a lot to process each tick in conjunction with a large factory.

Rseding91 wrote:Interesting. Your save has 35~ locomotives with 250+ entries in their schedule that are constantly switching between automatic and manual mode. That D.E.S.T.R.O.Y.S. performance in the Trains GUI.

I believe I can fix the issue but I found other issues with the Trains GUI that makes me want to take it to the chopping block and redesign how the internals work now that we know what all needs to be addressed in its inner workings

I blame siggboy, hes the one who designed the automated system and gave me the tools to ruin your stuff!
We just used it and continued building on it. Also, you should see it when the system is busy after installing a lot of new mining outposts, its beutiful

I have noticed a rather large delay when trains go from automatic to manual but did not really have issues with it except one time when a bug in the smart trains mod caused a train to loop between automatic and manual. Let me tell you, that really killed everything

If you are redesigning stuff, it would be awesome if we could search for station names from within trains as well, it is a pain to scroll through manually looking for a specific station in the schedule. I can describe what and how we use it more in detail if you want to know what we are up to.

Rseding91 wrote:I drastically improved performance in the Trains GUI but didn't find anything interesting in the production stats. The production stats simply draws a lot of data for the graphs which can be a lot to process each tick in conjunction with a large factory.

Thats awesome! Regarding the production tab, Its not critical since Im not building and moving while viewing it.