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I have a megabase which is right at the point where increasing its size will bring its UPS below 60 on my laptop (hovering a large blueprint makes it go below 60, for example). I profiled this base using Visual C++ (Windows 10). According to the profile, 2.89% of my time is spent updating the electric network. Is there any way to optimize this aside from reducing the number of entities? I have one network, almost entirely powered by solar panels and accumulators, although I did keep a nuclear plant around so that I made sure that infrastructure was still working.

Are there entities which hurt UPS more or less in terms of electric network? For example, I could imagine beacons not really hurting UPS much, since they don't really have a variable power cost.

I'm not an expert on this, but I understand Nuclear hurts UPS on megabases, due to the steam.
I'm currently running nuclear, at 3.4GW, and still getting full 60 UPS. Not sure at what point it becomes an issue.
I believe most very large megabases rely on solar for this reason - which you're using - so not sure if theres any further improvement available. (?)

As a side note, I think ghosts hurt UPS, due to transparency calculations etc - so hovering your BP may give you different results compared to the actual final built version.

As I said, I'm not 100% sure on any of the above, so apologies if I'm incorrect.

According to Rseding switching power off to inserters hurts ups more than letting their input belts/chests run dry because they wont enter idle.
Maybe it's due to my 2 stage switch that first turns off inputs and then power, but I havn't noticed any difference between always on and switched production lanes myself.

Optera wrote: ↑

Thu Oct 25, 2018 6:44 am

According to Rseding switching power off to inserters hurts ups more than letting their input belts/chests run dry because they wont enter idle.
Maybe it's due to my 2 stage switch that first turns off inputs and then power, but I havn't noticed any difference between always on and switched production lanes myself.

He's said several times that any machine with an empty energy buffer can not go to sleep (i.e. has full UPS impact even if it's idle). So the UPS optimal layout is: Only solar/accu, no power switches, singular network. And if you have that you can't get any better UPS wise.

Maybe your input-starving manages to turn off the production line after it has already gone into "sleep mode" due to input starvation.