[0.15.10] very slow catching up // bad performance on server

[manuakasam]

Hey guys,

so today I've run into two different issues that are somewhat difficult for myself to solve.

Issue #1 - Catching up

We're playing a map on a remote server (self-hosted). The past days connecting to the server hasn't been an issue. Today, however, the process of "catching up" has turned into a nightmare.
So much so that the loading bar even was running into the wrong direction. We've had to set the gamespeed on the server to 0.1 until I caught up and then reset it to 1 for me to be able to properly connect.

Issue #2 - Heavy FPS drops

FPS on the multiplayer server is dropping significantly more than it is locally. The graphic drops don't seem to be tied to graphics quality, as I've done a test with literally everything on the lowest settings.
While FPS drops occur both locally and on the server, the server appears to prove much more resource hungry. I have added two screenshots from myself from the same map at about the same position. Once from the server and once locally. The data differs significantly. To further - potentially, that is - help out I've also added a screenshot containing the same data information from my friends perspective. Again, lots of differences.

I'm not really sure how to continue debugging this any any further help will be appreciated!

Things I've done so far:

• restart the game / pc / router
• bring graphics down to a 1990s level
• close everything apart from factorio
• window mode / fullscreen mode
• trying out opengl

We are using a couple of mods on our game but nothing drastic, I suppose they can be seen in the logfiles.

We've tried to figure this out on our own, we compared my data against the friends data. But we're running out of ideas. Hopefully someone of you has some ideas as to what the heck is the occuring problem.

Many thanks in advance!

- Sam

[Loewchen]

Deactivate vsync for your frame rate issue.
The catchup phase takes as long as the machine takes to reach the same tick as the server is, if it is not fast enough, it can stay in the state of catching up indefinitely.
Moved to technical help.

[manuakasam]

First off all thanks for the fast reply Loewchen,

vsync turned on has no effect on my framerates whatsoever, sadly.
My PC is more than capable of handling these bases and we've had bigger ones in the past, without these catching up issues tho :S

[Eraldoe]

Also experiencing very slow catching up on the latest patches.

[Rseding91]

Also experiencing very slow catching up on the latest patches.

Nothing has changed in that area for quite some time so any slowdown you're experiencing has nothing to do with the patch version and more to do with your factory now being bigger/taking more CPU time.

[zipman]

my friend and I have played factorio before and after the .15 update have been having the catching up problem and lagging and general sluggishness. We are just starting out a new factory so its not we have a big factory causing an issue. He has tried unchecking the vsync option without me even joining and still its choppy.

[Engimage]

It is a good practice to pause the game when someone is going to join it (if you are not the first one to join headless server tho).
In this case there is almost nothing to catch up and a player joins the game instantly after loading the map.

Catching up is actually processing (recalculating) all game ticks from the moment you started map download to the current moment. And the "current moment" is moving while you try to catch up.
So to catch up your CPU should be able to process game faster than 60 UPS (or the current server speed). So if you are running a megabase which puts your game on a margin (say 54 UPS locally) you just can't physically catch up with the server which can run it at 60 UPS.

Also be aware that displaying graphics also consumes your CPU slightly so when you say zoom out to see many active objects (like your screenshot has for example) your computer has even higher load and UPS drop relative to server which might lead into lag or even drop from the game as your client can't physically keep up with the server.

So when setting up the server you should consider all these things and maybe drop overall game speed a bit lower say to 0.8 so all client are able to keep up with no lags.
Everything I described is not relevant to some sort of a bug in the game but hopefully makes sense to you so you can understand the reason of your bad performance.