Laptop CPU/Ram performance

[Sparkysam]

So I and a friend (@Mimigaking) are noticing a strange occurrence with my laptop and also his where factorio does not see the 8 threads my laptop has available ( i7 - 4710 MQ) and treats the game as if I had a single thread Example

but when set to a 4 core it does this example 2

can anyone explain the fact that why the game does not detect I have more than one core??
I understand this game is mostly single threaded and a laptop is not exactly what people have in mind when playing this game but it only seeing 1 of 8 threads is kinda frustrating since it is set to 8 and my computer at home runs just fine with it set to 8 ( 4930K)

any help in improving my gameplay so that I do not run at 5 fps/ups would be of great help.

I have also noticed my factorio ram usage caps at 3000.4 MB and will not go any higher Ram usage
We are noticing this might be also due to Ram as well, and a solution or even a slight fix would be great.

p.s find attached my spec of my laptop, which can run Solidworks renders in no time at all and is designed for an engineering background at a university.

Edit:
Interesting we found decreasing the speed of the server helped the clients increase in performance to matching speeds.

[MimigaKing]

Me and @Sparkysam just made some more testings and it turns out that the slower the server, the better the performances.

My server's CPU is running at 3.4GHz natively (i5 3570k). Whenever I run at that speed, @Sparkysam was getting about 5 FPS, and so was I on my own laptop with a better CPU than him. (@Samkysam has a i7-4710MQ while my own laptop has a i7-4720HQ)

As soon as I have modified windows policies to downclock the cpu to 2.4 GHz (which is 70% min/max processor state), both @Sparkysam and my laptop got 50 FPS and are now running the game perfectly. (/c game.speed = 0.835)

Now my question is, why is it that the SLOWER the server is, the better the performances?

Thanks =)

[lexx]

because your CPU can't keep up with the server, Note factorio is mostly single threaded game at the moment (0.15 might change that)

some tasks like bot and train pathing, networking and GUI are run on there own thread but very minimal impact and you see only 12% CPU use normally on a quad core CPU with HT,,

windows 8 and higher is a little odd how it reports CPU usage (25% seems normal on windows 8+ for single threaded tasks) if you go to details tab and sort by CPU speed you find the real cpu usage (its using around 12-13% on 8 threaded CPU and 25% on 4 threaded CPUs as that is 1 Full core as shown on the CPU performance page)

the problem is the UPS on the server does not slow down for people that can't keep up that are connected to the server, so the problem your having is that your CPU in your laptop and desktop is slower than the game that is running on the server CPU so you're trying to constantly catch up with server (just set game speed to 0.7-0.9 if you going mad with belts and don't use loaders) most likely why your finding that slow the server down is better for the factorio players connected to it

the problem is at the moment the simulation runs on the server and the client at the same time so if you start falling behind you PC starts having to do 2-3 times more work to catch up and results in 5 UPS and constant catching up

F4 show multiplayer statistics you see buffers higher than 10 you find it jumpy and if you're catching up you need to slow the game speed down on the server to 0.9 or lower so you can keep up with the server simulation

[Sparkysam]

because your CPU can't keep up with the server, Note factorio is mostly single threaded game at the moment (0.15 might change that)

some tasks like bot and train pathing, networking and GUI are run on a there own thread but the very minimal impact and you see only 12% CPU use normally on a quad core CPU with HT,

windows 8 and higher is a little odd how it reports CPU usage (25% seems normal on windows 8+ for single threaded tasks) if you go to details tab and sort by CPU speed you find the real CPU usage (its using around 12-13% of 8 threaded CPU and 25% on 4 threaded CPUs as that is 1 Full core as shown on the CPU performance page)

the problem is the UPS on the server does not slow down for people that can't keep up that are connected to the server, so the problem you're having is that your CPU in your laptop and desktop is slower than the game that is running on the server CPU so you're trying to constantly catch up with server (just set game speed to 0.7-0.9 if you going mad with belts and don't use loaders) most likely why your finding that slow the server down is better for the factorio players connected to it

the problem is at the moment the simulation runs on the server and the client at the same time so if you start falling behind you PC starts having to do 2-3 times more work to catch up and results in 5 UPS and constant catching up

F4 show multiplayer statistics you see buffers higher than 10 you find it jumpy and if you're catching up you need to slow the game speed down on the server to 0.9 or lower so you can keep up with the server simulation

Which sounds like a normal solution but what we have found is the complete opposite, that fact we speed the server up(game speed) but lower it's clock speed and give it 4 cores means the people going at a higher clock go faster but the people at the lower end seem to be catered for as well in term of this; this would not have been my first thought from working with Minecraft servers.
lowering game speed does help but it is definitely clock speed based not game speed, I think a patch or mod which can adapt the clock speed of the CPU in a way to the lowest person on the server or even an AVG would help a lot of issues associated with some servers.