Factorio Forums

Me and a friend have built an almost-megabase in multiplayer. He's the server, I'm the client. My problem: I'm suddenly stuck at <4 FPS, while he can keep playing just fine.

This historically has happened when I as a client am unable to match the speed of the server. We worked around that by reducing the game.speed to 0.8, then 0.6 and ultimately 0.5. It made for slow gameplay, but it was playable. A few weeks back, the train pathfinding algorithm was improved. This helped performance massively, we were able to return the game.speed to 1.0 and have grown the factory at that setting since.

Today, we again hit the threshold where my FPS falls. This time, reducing the game.speed does nothing to pull me out of the quagmire. The trigger seemed to be building 5 new trains to serve a new mining outpost...

If I load the save in singleplayer, I have absolutely no problem with playing this factory at full speed. I don't quite know what multiplayer difference exists. The major difference seems to be the "Waiting for Update" statistic shown in both screenshots. Is there anything that we can do to resolve this?

Multiplayer - note Waiting for Update @520:

factorio-multiplayer.log

Singleplayer - same Waiting for Update @28:

factorio-singleplayer.log

Savegame if that is interesting:
factory.zip

Moving to technical help. From everything you describe you are just falling behind the server. Unless anyone can show otherwise that's just how multiplayer works. There's additional overhead in multiplayer to perform CRCs, network logic, and the other connected player(s) so it ends up taking more CPU time.

Thanks for the reply (and so quickly!).

I will accept that answer, but yeah, it does sound like the end of the road for the factory then. Too bad

I'm a bit surprised how the factory went from running smoothly from both of us at 60 FPS at game.speed=1 to Danner getting under 3 FPS even at game.speed=0.8 within literally seconds, and the only thing that happened during those seconds was adding a few trains.

Must say, though, big kudos for the various performance improvements you guys have put out during the last few months. Last year when the factory was half this size, even I as server had significant lag spikes when biter activity was high, now I don't even notice a FPS drop when nuking a long chain of biter bases. Thank you for your dedication to making this game the best that it can be, I wish certain other companies had half your dedication