Probably my system but... Disk use 98% and higher (urk!)

[Leigh]

Win 8.1 i7 4790k 4ghz, GTX 970 4GB, 16gb DDR3 ram

Tried to generate a 1:5 Megalomaniac map with default slider settings and low towns and industires. Brought my PC to a grinding halt. Literally, a grinding halt.

Game did not crash, but it did freeze on the loading screen, and PC slowed right down. After a few minutes I was able to see the Task Manager and my disk use was 98%, which was probably why the huge slowdown.

I think I have some Seagate 3TB thing, HDD not a SSD (yes, I'm one of them that puts games on a HDD). Never heard the thing crunch before.

Not blaming the game at all, and I will repeat that, I am not blaming the game at all, but I do want to know if my case is unique or others are seeing similar issues.

Then again, most of you probably have games on SSDs, I have my operating system on SSD and personal files/games on a HDD. Just what I had done when the PC was built.

Yes my PC could probably do with some overhauling, but can't say that I've had such a major hang before. Spawnwng a map of same stats in TPF1 is slow but has no issues.

[Huperspace]

if you have steam installed on the HDD than the TPF2 saves are too, as the save get bigger and bigger 1GB is not seldom with that map size and mods. A HDD is too slow for it.
Also AVs tend to scan all files loaded or unloaded, so a whitelist of the game's folder helps keep the disk usage lower.

1TB SSD is not that expensive anymore, you can get a SATA one, which is enought, for around 100€.

[uzurpatorex]

Megalomaniac maps require megalomaniac amount of memory - 16GB is probably not enough. That is one. I play on small maps with few cities and that takes ~6GB of memory.

Autosave will be saved to whatever is your steam folder. If that is a spinning rust then each save will drop ~200MB-300MB of data, which is going to be a problem.

Three - if your swap file is on that HDD, then once problem no.1 hits and the OS starts to pretend it has more memory using your HDD - performance is going to suffer.

First of all - make sure that your swap-file is on the SSD.
Second - if you can, move the game to the SSD ( or at least the save folder to the SSD ).

From there - you will need to spend moneys - get more memory ( which would be your priority, TPF _likes_ memory ), get larger ssd to play the game off.

[Martin]

First questions I'd ask.. Where is your windows installed? On that disk, what is the remaining space? What's the swap cache size on it? What's the rpm speed of the drive? 7.2 or 10k or other?
On your disk the game is on, Same questions.
How long does the game pause/stall for?
Are you referring to load time, post load?
When did you last defrag the drives? Is maintenance on auto or manual timer? (with a 3tb drive it's probable it's a new/ish drive/pc.. More space.. probably runs slower. It's like Mages in mmo's.. they hit hard.. but have no defence.

disk use 98% is totally acceptable.. I'd complain it isn't using that remaining 2%.

If it isn't running at 100%.. it's wasting cycles.. and that isn't good enough. ;)

If you have 16 gb ram.. adding more might help. Or you might just not be waiting long enough for it to load.

[CunkFeatures]

Originally posted by Lei:

Game did not crash, but it did freeze on the loading screen, and PC slowed right down. After a few minutes I was able to see the Task Manager and my disk use was 98%, which was probably why the huge slowdown..

Wait for it to finish loading mate.
Once the games loaded into RAM it only needs access when new vehicles come into play.
Might be worth sticking to Large maps for now.

[Leigh]

Thanks for the comments, I would like to make "counter comments" if you will, not to any in particular, just in general.


My system was built in 2015 by a online store (I haven't the confidence to correctly build my own, and I don't want the stress of any issues), so while an older system it is reasonably healthy.


My OS is on a SSD, as I stated in the OP.


While obviously quite a gap between them, I had no performance/map generation issues in TPF1 (beyond the normal late game slowdown that wasn't all that major on my rig).


Up to "Very Large" size I have had no issues with Map Generation in TPF2 until then. (I jumped from VL to Mega)


TPF2 gives me sub par performance at times but really doesn't stress my system at all. Here is a snippit of a post I made in another thread.

Originally posted by Lei:

TPF2 barely stresses my 970, between 50%-70% usage which is fine I feel. Don't listen to the meanies, little GPU, I still wuv you

Out of the box TPF2 only uses one physical CPU, which is far from perfect in today's gaming. With the "-USEALLAVAILABLECORES -high" modifier in the Steam Launch options it spreads the load across the 8 physical cores of my i7 4790k 4ghz, with typical peaks no higher than 20% use, the rare and occasional spike towards the mid 30s.

From what I have seen, RAM usage is similar; high, but not drastically high, not high enough to cause actual issues.


I have never, ever, ever had a Disk use of near 100% before. And I definitely not heard it crunch before. It is at this point where I just want to reiterate something from my OP;

Originally posted by Lei:

Not blaming the game at all, and I will repeat that, I am not blaming the game at all, but I do want to know if my case is unique or others are seeing similar issues.

I have no save file at this time, and just playing with the map generator.


I always disable autosave.


As of this game I had yet to load a map with mods, though I do have some installed, just not active.


My Antivirus gives the green light to Steam related stuff in general, with a couple of exceptions that I put into place personally.


As with TPF1, I expect the map generation process for larger maps to take a few mins, and I am used to seeing the Task Manager state "Not Responding" when the game clearly is, and just thinking things over. I am not impatient in that regard, but I did get freaked out by the crunching noises.


I am unaware of the exact spec of the HDD, other than it is a 2015-ish Seagate 3TB.

EDIT: Found my invoice for the system build.

SSD 120GB CSSD-F120GBLS LS
HDD 3TB SEAGATE ST3000DM001 SATA3

[Everyone]

This game should not need to write to disk to generate a map. It just needs enormous amount of RAM.

If your RAM overflows, Windows uses a hard drive to extend it seamlesly. It uses what is called a "page file" for this purpose, it means that it is paging in and out data from disk into the RAM as it is accessed or written.

While this works, this is the worst possible working situation that would look pretty much what you are describing.

Let me illustrate with this table, which contains access speeds to various memory types, including main memory (RAM), SSD, and a disk:

L1 cache reference ......................... 0.5 ns
Branch mispredict ............................ 5 ns
L2 cache reference ........................... 7 ns
Mutex lock/unlock ........................... 25 ns
Main memory reference ...................... 100 ns             
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy ............. 3,000 ns  =   3 µs
Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network ....... 20,000 ns  =  20 µs
SSD random read ........................ 150,000 ns  = 150 µs
Read 1 MB sequentially from memory ..... 250,000 ns  = 250 µs
Round trip within same datacenter ...... 500,000 ns  = 0.5 ms
Read 1 MB sequentially from SSD* ..... 1,000,000 ns  =   1 ms
Disk seek ........................... 10,000,000 ns  =  10 ms
Read 1 MB sequentially from disk .... 20,000,000 ns  =  20 ms
Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA .... 150,000,000 ns  = 150 ms

It is clear that the difference between the RAM and disk read is enormous. It may be hard to comprehend these numbers, so to illustrate them better, we can shift them to human scale.

If the main memory access would take the same time as brushing your teeth, a SSD access would take whole weekend, and a hard drive access would be a semester at university.

Reference: https://gist.github.com/hellerbarde/2843375

[Rod]

It's also not good to generalize about SSD speeds...

Traditional 7200 RPM HDD: 160 MB/s
SATA III SSD: 600 MB/s
NVMe M.2 SSD: 3500 MB/s

My NVMe M.2 1TB SSD is easily 5 to 6 times faster than a traditional SSD, and this is where I have Windows and TF2 installed. Load times are excellent.

[Everyone]

Originally posted by Rod:

My NVMe M.2 1TB SSD is easily 5 to 6 times faster than a traditional SSD.

I think you have missed the point. It would still be few orders of magnitude slower.

[CunkFeatures]

Originally posted by Lei:

Originally posted by Lei:

TPF2 barely stresses my 970, between 50%-70% usage which is fine I feel. Don't listen to the meanies, little GPU, I still wuv you

Out of the box TPF2 only uses one physical CPU, which is far from perfect in today's gaming. With the "-USEALLAVAILABLECORES -high" modifier in the Steam Launch options it spreads the load across the 8 physical cores of my i7 4790k 4ghz, with typical peaks no higher than 20% use, the rare and occasional spike towards the mid 30s.

Another issue could be the flag (if Urban even use them). You have 4 cores and 8 threads, not 8 physical cores. HyperThreading is slower, especially after recent events and Intel's patches.
Could be causing conflict. Probably just need to be patient.

[Leigh]

Originally posted by tomtalk24:

Could be causing conflict. Probably just need to be patient.

Patience isn't an issue, it was the Freddy Kruger scraping that made me panic a bit haha.

[Rod]

Originally posted by Everyone:

Originally posted by Rod:

My NVMe M.2 1TB SSD is easily 5 to 6 times faster than a traditional SSD.

I think you have missed the point. It would still be few orders of magnitude slower.

And what is the point? Get plenty of RAM, problem solved.

I have 32GB of RAM and paging disabled. TF2 runs great. And having a fast SSD still benefits load times for things that need to be loaded from disc (e.g. loading the game initially, starting a new game, loading a saved game).

[Enron]

The problem the OP is experiencing is the hard drive is being used as a page file which another poster commented. In other words OP's RAM isn't enough.