First load *incredibly* slow ( > 20 minutes) [Resolvedish]

[deepfryer]

When I try to load Factorio (10.8, Linux x86_64, Ubuntu 12.04) it appears to be stuck at the "Loading sprites" stage, except every few minutes either the % complete will tick upwards, or I'll get a console message with libpng whining about incorrect sRGB profiles. I take the latter to mean that it *is* making some kind of progress in loading images, but it's not clear to me if this is due to some mis-configuration on my end, intended behaviour, or a bug.

The very first time I ran it, it took a while to reach the stage where it prints:

Code: Select all

00:49:34 Info Atlas: Initial atlas bitmap size is 8192
00:49:34 Info Atlas: Created atlas bitmap 8192x8178
00:49:34 Info Atlas: Created atlas bitmap 8192x3878

I killed it some time after this (it had been loading for over half an hour, and had reached 16% or so) and restarted it. Now it reaches the "Created atlas bitmap" stage fairly promptly, before slowing down to a glacial pace. Do I just need to let it cook for a few hours to cache something else, or is there something else I can do to speed it up?

Other details:
- Gfx card: NVidia 8800 GTS, 320MB VRAM (I realize this is a bit small given the demands of the game)
- CPU 2.4ghz Intel Q6600, 8GB RAM
- I've changed config.ini to set graphics to low; I also experimented with reducing the number of directions for the train/car/wagon sprites, which was mentioned in a thread dealing with graphics loading issues.

[deepfryer]

Profiling determined that it was derping around in the nvidia GL libraries. I updated the nvidia drivers (from v.170 to v.311), and now it makes progress (although it still takes a few minutes to load).

[cube]

I have no idea what could cause this, even on much weaker machines the start takes only a few (20? 30?) seconds. The first start after updating the game or installing a mod is expected to be longer (but not by much, maybe by another 30 seconds) because we are updating a cache of graphics crops. This doesn't show up as a section by itself in the loading screen, instead its added to "Loading mods".

[deepfryer]

Yeah, my guess is that some pathological behaviour in the driver is being triggered, especially in the older version - I tried running 'perf' while it was all hung up, and more than 95% of the CPU was being spent in the GL library. Of that, about half of it was spent in the kernel, zero-filling mmapped pages, and the rest of the time seemed to be spent in something related to /dev/zero (which I think the nvidia drivers use?) - I can't really tell without debug symbols. So basically, doing an incredible amount of nothing!

What is happening as the sprites are loaded?

[Blackence]

This seems to indicate that allegro desn't work too well in combination with the nvidia driver in some (rare?) cases, maybe it depends on the hardware used? https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/614008

Since Factorio uses allegro, fixing it should fix Factorio if the devs pick up the allegro patch. However I'm not even sure if they use allegro 5… Maybe you can find that info and take a look at the allegro source to find out what's going on. And this might be one of the cases where a dynamically linked (against allegro) factorio binary could come in handy.