Factorio Forums

First off, huge fan of the game, I have about 250 hours in so far and this is the first real issue that's occurred. I'm currently running my first decent-sized factory in an effort to knock out the mass production 3 achievement; nothing compared to some of the massive bases I've seen here, but still a respectable ~1.5K mines, 400 steam engines, 10K solar panel, etc-sized base. About 45 hours in, I'm running back to my base from torching some enemy territory to pick up some walls and turrets, when suddenly my frame rate drops from the steady 60 FPS I'd had for the last 45 hours, down to ~14 FPS, for seemingly no reason. I wasn't plopping down a huge array of buildings, I wasn't fighting a massive swarm of biters, I wasn't doing anything that would increase the load on my system, literally just running back to my base to grab some stuff. The base was the same size as it had been for the last several hours, no massive new additions. If anything, I figure my recent alien-torching session should've lessened the load on my system. Fewer spawners/biters to keep track of, eh ?

Still, since this was my first time at this length of game + level of production, I checked my system to see if it was getting overly taxed. Nope: CPU never passed 25% no matter what I was doing, and memory usage according to task manager never passed ~1,700,000K. My system specs in case it helps:

i7-2600K quad core @ 3.4Ghz
14GB RAM
Solid state drive

My system can usually handle anything I can throw at it short of trying to max out new releases, so I don't think my system would be the issue. I tried turning down all graphical settings to bare minimum (making the game look remarkably similar to the original Command & Conquer), and this didn't really help at all.

The kicker is that if I start a new game, FPS is right back at 60, so I really have no idea what's up. Yes, the factory I'm running in the slowed game is indeed bigger than any previous ones I've built, but i've seen some factories on here that are literally 100-1000x the size of mine. Are all those people with the giga-factories just running their Factorio on DoD supercomputers or something?

I've attached a screenshot with the F5 data shown and a copy of the save, any help or advice is appreciated. Hope to have it running like its old self again soon, I don't think I'll be able to hit 20M circuits with the game running like molasses

Factorio isn't multithreaded, so with a quad core the maximum percentage cpu used is 25%.

kinnom wrote:Factorio isn't multithreaded, so with a quad core the maximum percentage cpu used is 25%.

Huh, so the CPU is bottlenecking this? Is there a way to sidestep this at all? As mentioned I already tried dropping graphics settings to minimal but it didn't do much. Also saw some people mentioning elsewhere that v-sync is a bad-performance culprit sometimes, but switching that on/off didn't do anything appreciable.

I'm also extremely curious now about the sort of rigs people are running who are building those huge 1 rocket per min, 100K+ robot bases. If my mid/high-end PC is struggling now, how on earth are they running factories ~1000x the size of mine?

As you can see on the map, you enraged massive amounts of biters.
Run to improve performance.

a few other tips: limit the amount of logistic robots, replace long lines of belts with underground belts (same with pipes) and install a mods like ups up or undecorator.
0.15 will also come with more optimalisations