Game started laggin after exploring

[Balthazar]

I ran a bit further away from my base, and very suddenly the performance tanked. It's still playable but the framerate is making me nauseus, and i don't want it to get worse. Its a pretty old game so idk if maybe im just at the limit of what my PC can handle, although that seems really silly since i did was scout an area smaller than the scan range of a radar and the change was very sudden

Anything i can do to figure out where the drop is coming from?

[Coolthulhu]

Is the low FPS constant or does it "jump" for a second and then fall down back to normal?
It is normal for the game to slow down heavily for a short while when generating a new chunk of terrain. If it doesn't stop after you stop exploring, it might mean that your game is too big to be fully stored in RAM - factorio is a huge memory hog at the moment.

If reloading the save helps for a longer while, you might have discovered a memory leak.

[Balthazar]

Its constant, reloaded my autosave and it was still doing it, but going back one extra autosave (Right before exploring) removed the problem. Its not slowing down just while exploring, even if i run back to base it's still doing it, ive had the game running some 20 odd minutes and theres no improvement.

I have 8 gb, is it really that bad? Any way i can check how much factorio is eating? (Taskmanager is only saying 1.5gb but who even knows with that rubbish)

I'm just confused because the drop was immediate, it didnt gradually get worse, it just faceplants right after i ran up to this biter town. At first i thought it was the town, but it was still lagging after i razed it.

[Coolthulhu]

Task manager doesn't show all used memory, but if you aren't actively using at least 4gb of memory (constantly alt-tabbing, having chrome with 10 heavily javascripted tabs in the background etc.) it should be good enough. Sounds like RAM is not the problem then.

Maybe your game generated a chunk full of buggy biters or something. Biters' AI is currently imperfect and can result in stupid behavior and bad pathing. It might be related to imported saves (I had a lot of biter bugginess in a save imported from 0.7).
It may be a good idea to file a bug report with the save uploaded.