Burner inserters and power insufficiency: am I crazy?

[golfmiketango]

I use burner inserters well into midgame, and, I could swear that their performance is negatively impacted by power insufficiencies.

Today pretty much I blew the breakers in my base and everything was shut off. This stopped the flow of coal to my burner inserters. I fixed the coal supply but when I resupplied the coal I came back to check my boilers and all the burner inserters were just sitting there doing nothing with coal right next to them and the boiler blinking for lack of fuel. The few that were running were going super slow just like the electric inserters. I have seen stuff like this happen in 0.12 as well a few times. Am I missing something or is this a bug? Next time I'll preserve a save but I just wanted to post this semi-useless report and see if anyone else had seen similar or if maybe there is some obvious head-slapper explanation that makes this a pebkac?

[Koub]

By pure curiosity what kind of belt do you provide coal to your burner inserters with ?
Hint : red belts are too quick for burner inserters. If they are backed up, it's OK : the inserter starts moving, aiming at one coal, and just gets the next or third one. But if you get only spread-out coal, as when you encounter a shortage, you're doomed.
try this contraption :

Factorio - Red belt too quick for burner inserters.JPG (25.9 KiB) Viewed 2126 times

[golfmiketango]

Yellow belt. Anyhow it shouldn't matter as this was a dead-end belt jammed full of coal. Here's the scene of the crime:

SceneOfCrime.png (2.17 MiB) Viewed 2062 times

But I have suspected burner inserters slow down in low-power situations in many contexts, basically for as long as I've been a sufficiently well-educated factorio player to think of it as a potential bug.

Perhaps, it's just an illusory meatspace time-dilation effect caused by the UPS droop that tends to correlate with power insufficiency.

The fully stopped burner inserters, on the other hand, looked very much like a bug. Wish I'd saved my game, in retrospect, but I was so immersed at the time, I couldn't be bothered. Picked up my inserters and placed 'em back to work around it.

[Koub]

Then I'm sorry, I have no idea : I only use burner inserters when I play with Marathon mod, so my experience of these is close to nonexistant
Have you been able to reproduce it at will ? It would help a lot if it was the case.

[golfmiketango]

Then I'm sorry, I have no idea : I only use burner inserters when I play with Marathon mod, so my experience of these is close to nonexistant
Have you been able to reproduce it at will ? It would help a lot if it was the case.

Not the issue where they stopped eating fuel, no, that just happened the one time, I'm afraid. But the slowdown -- or perceived slowdown -- does seem to happen pretty regularly -- pretty much any time I encounter a power insufficiency except in the very, very early game where I'm just setting up power for the first time.

[golfmiketango]

Hahaha I just happened to discover the cause. The first row of boilers on the right was not supplied with cold water! So the water would simply trickle in as backflow from the other boilers, and probably only then /during/ power insufficiencies (or maybe also gluts) and piping hot already. From there, I have no idea what the rules are.... but regardless: undefined input behavior -> undefined output behavior. Probably still a bug somewhere, but a this is just a drop in the bucket -- no pun intended -- of undefined/undocumented fluid handling behaviors.