Factorio Forums

Not sure if this is the right sub forum for this. I am running a server on an old computer from the early 2000's. The game has slowed down to approximately 20 ups. When I look at system monitor no one core, of a quad core, is being pinned at 100%. Plenty of ram is available, nor is the CPU being thermal throttled. This leaves me to suspect that it is the ram speed. The speed of the ram currently installed is DDR2-800 MHz, and the motherboard can handle up to DDR2-1066 MHz. I realize that I should probably use a more up to date computer but I am not in the market for a new computer, thus why I am asking why a relatively cheap RAM upgrade would help very much.

Nick433 wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 23, 2020 1:38 am

Not sure if this is the right sub forum for this. I am running a server on an old computer from the early 2000's. The game has slowed down to approximately 20 ups. When I look at system monitor no one core, of a quad core, is being pinned at 100%. Plenty of ram is available, nor is the CPU being thermal throttled. This leaves me to suspect that it is the ram speed. The speed of the ram currently installed is DDR2-800 MHz, and the motherboard can handle up to DDR2-1066 MHz. I realize that I should probably use a more up to date computer but I am not in the market for a new computer, thus why I am asking why a relatively cheap RAM upgrade would help very much.

RAM is indeed a common bottleneck for large bases. The RAM upgrade from 800MHz to 1066MHz is about 33% faster, but most likely would still be the bottleneck after the upgrade. With a crude extrapolation you can (fingers crossed!!) hope to get a 33% boost in performance, so maybe your server could reach 26 UPS if you are lucky. Would that be worth it? Don't know.

I can't tell you anything for certain, but here are the three things I'd say:

1. Even if no one core is pegged at 100%, if CPU usage is consistently well above 25% it could just be due to the OS passing threads between cores, which happens (frequently?), presumably for thermal benefit (not sure if there are other reasons as well).

2. Improving CPU and RAM both have significant performance impacts, so if changing the CPU isn't an option, I'd be surprised if going from 800 to 1066MHz didn't help. I can't say which is more of a bottleneck in your situation, but it would almost certainly make a measurable difference. If performance scaled perfectly with RAM speed that would put you from ~20 to ~26 UPS, so you can probably take that as a reasonable upper bound. (If I had to make a semi-educated guess I'd say you could probably fairly reasonably get ~23-24 UPS with that, although most tests I've seen involve DDR3/4 and fast CPUs, so I don't have anything great to compare this to.) I assume DDR2 can be had for fairly cheap (I see 4GB 1066MHz for $10 on Newegg without looking into it much), so it could be a reasonable upgrade if you know you'll be using that computer for some time.

3. If available (and you're technically inclined and interested), you could try playing with CPU and/or RAM overclocking in the BIOS; both would presumably be helpful, but you might be able to get some possible gains (or at least an idea of which component is more of a limiting factor in your situation) through that.