Adventures in performance optimization (and new FactorioBox highscore)

[cjbturin]

I have this strange hobby of trying to make a single application run as fast possible, and this time I took Factorio on the board. Results are promising so far, so I thought I'll share, especially since Factorio being used in benchmarks is on the rise, and you can do much more apart from getting a better CPU to make it run faster.

First of all: numbers - https://factoriobox.1au.us/result/6808c ... e83c05f8a3 . 787UPS on flame_Sla 10k - 10x1000spm Belt Module. This is the new highscore, excluding that one outlier at 1000UPS, which I assume to be a glitch.

System specs: 9800X3d paired with 64GB DDR5 6000Mhz CL30.
BIOS Adjustments:
-> EXPO + PBO + Curve Optimizer (The same stuff as presented in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU3ekfB4y18&t=964s , strategy 2. I might try more aggressive OC in the future.)
-> additionally, disabled SMT (so one virtual core = one physical core), virtualisation and IOMMU.

Software: Arch Linux, kernel 6.12.1. Factorio - standalone (not-steam).
KDE Plasma + Wayland, but i guess that does not impact the benchmark script in menaningful way. Big kudos to raiguard though, because with latest nvidia drivers the wayland experience is flawless.

Software adjustments:
- reserved 32GB of 1GB-sized Hugepages and assigned them to be used with mimalloc memory allocator. Then, using LD_PRELOAD trick, I forced the benchmark and factorio process / subprocesses to utilize the mimalloc shared object.

Conclusions: The gain is significant, both in benchmark and actual gaming. What's even more interesting, the environment adjustments provide greater performance gain than a CPU upgrade. On my previous rig with 5800X3d i managed to squeeze out 522UPS ( https://factoriobox.1au.us/result/72953 ... 0cfffa2f7e ) which is better than some 9800X3D results.

[ealrann]

Thanks, this helps a lot indeed.

I'm doing some Shattered planet speedrun, and the UPS drop is massive: I was regularly at 27 UPS (with an AMD 7950X + 4070 super). Using hugepage and mimalloc gives me an extra 10-15 UPS.

If someone want to reproduce the trick on Archlinux:
1. Install mimalloc

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pacman -S mimalloc

2. Edit the kernel parameters for the hugepage. I'm using Grub, so edit the file /etc/default/grub to add some the parameters in GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT:

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default_hugepagesz=1G hugepagesz=1G hugepages=16

Then reload your grub config. 16Gb is far enough for me.

3. Edit the steam launch options of the game to run it with hugepage and mimalloc:

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LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libmimalloc.so MIMALLOC_RESERVE_HUGE_OS_PAGES=12 MIMALLOC_SHOW_STATS=1 %command%

You can verify it works watching this command, the number of free page should decrease when you launch the game and start playing:

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grep -i huge /proc/meminfo