Assistance need - getting odd, stuttering lag

[DrKirre]

Heya, folks! Love the game, found it via Malkasphia's LP of it, HAD to get it as a result. Alas, I'm having a bit of a problem - there's an odd, stuttering sort of lag. Every few seconds to few minutes, everything will hang and loop for a very short time, then skip ahead past it. It's VERY weird and I haven't the foggiest what's causing the issue. Please assist! My system specs are as follows:
Phenom X4 3.1 ghz quad-core
12gb ram
2x Radeon 7770 HD (Crossfire)

I should be able to run this no sweat, and yet... this is happening! Please assist!

[SilverWarior]

Lag which ocurs every few minutes is the lag caused by autosave feature.
Lag which ocurs every few seconds could be caused by biter pathfinding. Providing savegame might help in tracking this out.
Game could also lag quite a bit when zoomed out and with lots of trees in sight.

[DrKirre]

It's the trees. My first world is forest as far as the eye can see, trees in all directions. The kind of arboreal wonderland that would make an elf shed tears of joy. (Would post save, but it's on my other computer at the moment).

[kovarex]

Hello, trees shouldn't have anything to do with the lag.

As mentioned, it could be the autosave, in that case, you can set the autosave interval in options to be bigger.
You need quite a huge factory to slow down the game currently, but it is also possible, or it could be bug of some kind, so providing the save game so we can inspect is always a good idea if you want it to be fixed in next version.

[SilverWarior]

Hello, trees shouldn't have anything to do with the lag.

But they do cause a considerable lag. You don't see FPS information of going down, but you can notice that game becomes to stutter and everything slows down for quite a bit.
For instance: Normaly my game runs at 30 FPS (I belive I have "low FPS" option on). At this time there is no lag present. But once I move toward more forested area with lots of trees and zoom out the FPS drops down to about 25 FPS but game runs almost half as fast as it would othevise.
So usually I just avoid using zoomed out view when being near forest.

[kovarex]

That is strange, as

2x Radeon 7770 HD (Crossfire)

should have no trouble with the game. can you cap the print screen with time statistics? (shown when you press F5)

[DrKirre]

I completely failed to manually save, so it seems that's impossible. I'll definitely provide a copy of the save if it ever comes up again!

[dusho]

having same issue as well..
not sure it has anything to do with graphics
it happened just occasionally in v0.8.8 and when I saved game and reloaded again, stuttering was gone.
now in 0.9, it happens more often and save and re-load doesn't seems to be helping anymore. It's specially noticable when ambient music is on -> it annoyingly skips (had to turn off music for that reason) like thread would be blocked for couple of milliseconds , at that time, also game stutters - pauses
I haven't noticed any CPU spikes, memory usage of factorio is stable at 980MB (quite a lot, btw). Also this happens on fresh new world, no factories, no trees around, just random stutter now and then (I do zoom in and out quite often, though).
Feels like game thread is blocked by some time consuming operation - like before mentioned enemy pathing (as nothing else is around)
my configuration (laptop)
win7 SP1, 64bit
i7 Q720 1.6Ghz, 8GB RAM, Radeon Mobility 5870

EDIT:
was just checking stats with F5..
I noticed Game Update showing normally ~1% (150mc), but during stutter it jumps to ~4% (1600mc). Not sure if it's autosave, is it shown somewhere in stats that autosave is happening?

[SilverWarior]

Varsion 0.9 of factorio has autosave interval set to 2 minutes by default. try increasing it to see if the problem remains.
I also noticed considerable framerate drop near trees. In version 0.9 it is even more noticable than it was in version 0.8.8. Now my FPS tends to drop down to roughly 10 FPS when viewing many trees zomed out.