Factorio Forums

Hi,

ever since 0.15 I experience "micro"-freezes, where the game runs smoothly for a few seconds with UPS=60/FPS=60, then both drop to around ~55-57, which causes the game to freeze for <1sec then it runs smoothly on the lower UPS/FPS for 1-2 sec and then they would return back to 60/60 without a freeze for a few seconds before going through the same process over and over again. This is also not happening for every game session, as in a few occasions this just would not happen in the same save. I tried to turn down the graphics settings, however a real difference is only observed for the lowest setting...

Here it is running on 60/60:

and here the drop


I noticed, that everytime the drop occurs, a spike in disk usage happens (C:\ is system, on K:\ factorio is installed, both SSD's):

both the spikes on C and K seem to correlate with the freezes...
cpu and gpu aren't fully under load as can be seen here:

however a 1-3% spike in the total cpu load can be observed when the freezes occur.

I have attached the save file and the log from the last session

my system:
Windows 7
Intel i5-3560 @ 3.4GHz
Nvidea GeForce 660Ti 2GB Ram
16GB Memory

this problem might be related to viewtopic.php?f=173&t=45236, but to me it seems different and none of the possible fixes I read in the forums worked (e.g. enabling/disabling vsync and so on)

Just updated from 0.14.23 to 0.15.9
I understand that not stable release but have the same problems at high and medium settings.
wonder if that 660ti problem as i have same GPU

i7 4770k 4,6ghz
32gb RAM
asus NvidiaGF 660ti 2gb direct cu II
Windows 8.1 64x
game installed on SSD drive

I also get them and I have a Geforce 660 SC

However I believe it's save related.

Remember going to .15 reset some of the settings, including autosaves. I changed mine to 15 min from every 2 min.

It does freeze me for about 3-4seconds on every autosave.

this happens every few seconds and as the minimum interval for autosave is 1min I do not believe this is related

ok i think i fixed that for me by playing with " video memory usage" setting just lowering it to medium and still using HD sprites. But it very interesting as GPU-Z showing only 1.5gb usage total on "all" and "high" values of that setting and 900mb on medium which work fine.
my vision of problem is game loading some "bugged" huge textures sheets on higher "video memory usage" settings or just we all need upgrade GPU's

what really bugs (haha...) me here is that there seems to be well enough memory left and that the SSD load spikes everytime these freezes occur while GPU load stays stable... I might see ghosts here, but who knows. Maybe some assets are loaded from disk to memory and vice versa? (I really don't know enough about this, obviously )

another test on GF GTX 1070 8gb - on high settings of textures and all memory usage setting factorio works fine without this SSD spike, GPU-Z showing 2.2gb usage so it can be reason.Tested on my system just borrowed GPU from my friend.

well, the question then might be what happens to the "missing" 700mb memory?

We load all video assets into RAM on startup no matter what setting you use.

So, if something is going to disk it's outside our control (video card drivers/OS stuff).

Take a look at the number of hard faults in Performance Monitor's Memory tab(from factorio, but maybe other processes also). The hard faults are probably the disk activity you are seeing.

Additionally, Factorio can be a bit of a memory hog, causing Windows to put some of it in a page file even if you've got more then enough RAM free (which defeats pre-loading assets into RAM by pushing them back to disk) You've got 32 GB, and considering Factorio is 64 bit, no 4GB addressing limit. Try disabling your paging file if you haven't already, see if that speeds things up.

[Edit] If it does speed things up, do a health check on the hard drive or raid array that currently hosts the page file. Slow access times or slower throughput can indicate a disk that will fail soon.

I am experiencing this issue myself, but I am running 2048MB ATI AMD Radeon 5450. I'm not sure what is causing this issue myself.

I am also experiencing these micro freezes.
One is connected to the crafting menu, switching between logistics, production etc. for the first time after loading a game will guaranteed give me a micro freeze.

I have same issue with GTX 660 2Gb

It can be related to video-memory usage. Vanilla game display such slowdowns if it was launched after other game (Rainbow6 or Titanfall), but works consistently 60 fps after reboot.
Modded (full bobs + angels) game display slowdowns on "high" quality settings, but plays normally on "normal".

I am also experiencing this issue on macOS with Intel HD 6100 graphics.

Log file: https://pastebin.com/vKLpZ0cU

I had this issue as well starting with 0.15.9 (I think 9, not 10), but had zero issues before. However, I didn't play on my save from 0.15.5-0.15.8, so I don't know if it would've started then.

For me, I noticed a spike in PF delta for factorio.exe each time this happened. Doing one of two things improved this:
Changing sprite resolution from High to Normal.
OR
Changing memory usage from High to All.

It seems like some video memory management differences with non-beefy graphics hardware when using the "high" setting. When loading the game with "high", I can see in gpu-z that more of the gpu memory is in use initially, and after loading the save more dynamic is in use; with "all" it relies on the dynamic memory primarily. The process memory usage is significantly lower with "all" as well, which is odd.

memory setting high (screenshot was during the bad stutter):
http://imgur.com/a/KRoLK

memory setting all:
http://imgur.com/a/jLThk


Windows7
8gb ram
HD5870 1gb
Q9550 @ 3.8ghz

solntcev wrote:I have same issue with GTX 660 2Gb

It can be related to video-memory usage. Vanilla game display such slowdowns if it was launched after other game (Rainbow6 or Titanfall), but works consistently 60 fps after reboot.
Modded (full bobs + angels) game display slowdowns on "high" quality settings, but plays normally on "normal".

In this case the solution is simple. Don't play on high settings. Playing on High and with bigger mods ... It depends on the mods size, but less than 4GB of vram is risky.