Significant FPS / UPS drop - need to find reason

[Mister Dawg]

I have a factory with a few hundred hours on it. To try to quantify performance load - I'm drawing < 1GW, with about 1,500 total bots (mostly inactive). Maybe a dozen trains. Launched 130 rockets however that factory has been paused for a while. I'm on a couple of large cleared islands, so no warfare/guns/etc. Noting major - I've had much larger bases with no FPS issues.


Yesterday I cleared new ground - doubled the size of cleared land. Now - AFTER I did this all was well. I then got interrupted with a broken well pump at our house, and the game ran for a few hours on it's own. I did not play again yesterday - only saved/closed at the end of the day.

I start this morning - FPS/UPS are around 20. Of course autosave is useless since I let it run yesterday on it's own. I do have yesterday morning saved so I'm only looking at losing a day - not end of the world. That said - I'd like to fix the issue if possible.

I've checked the obvious - nothing seems out of whack. Bots aren't freaking out somewhere.

The only other thing I can think of is exposed territory/biters. While a bunch of land is exposed, it is clear. Comparing the maps, fewer nests are exposed today.

I turned on GPU-time-usage and I see differences to yesterday mornings game. Namely Frame cycle is ~44. Yesterday morning's game shows ~16. What would cause this?

What else can I check?

[Fel]

If you hit F5 you will see the debug screen, (F4 allows you to pick what informations are in the debug or even the normal screen by the way), look at the informations relative to the update time.

It should tell you fairly quickly what is taking the most time per update, making it much easier to track where it could be coming from.
If you don't know how to read that information, take a screenshot of it and post it here.

[Mister Dawg]

Alright I turned on show-fps and show-time-usage. Correct?

Time-usage shows "Wait for Update" ~44, and below under Update:, Game update, Entity update: it shows 40.

Yesterdays 'good' values are ~6-8 for these same times.

All other values are <1.

I'll work on a screenshot.

[Mister Dawg]

I did some research on Entity Update. It doesn't sound like there's a way to break it down any further than, everything.

I tried a few things, one of which was to kill all the enemies with a console command - since eradicating a bunch of them yesterday is the only real difference on the map.

Doing that brought the FPS/UPS back to 60/60. What is interesting though - the map still shows all the enemies it used to. No less red. Maybe the radar has to update but in some cases it's pinging them live - I can see them. They are there. Interesting.

I don't get it, but that's okay. Performance is back. I've lost achievements - but in this case I wasn't going to get any new ones on this play through so that's fine.

[Warlord]

Did you kill all biter spawners, or just the units? Spawners will respawn new biters to guard them.

It's possible you had a large biter swarm that was stuck attempting to pathfind. Killing biters cleared their calculations which freed up processor.

[Mister Dawg]

I was in the spider with missles and nukes. I was thorough - but a few always come back at least once.

The fact I subsequently connected my island to the new island via a railroad probably opened up many paths for the enemies that came back in the several hours I was away fixing our well.

Still interesting how the console command didn't appear to kill... anything. I just went through and cleaned the new island again. While there weren't many relative to initially, there were a few dozen nests, and my big map has all the red it did.

Just curious. It's almost if the game was hanging on to the enemies I killed yesterday, and the console command to kill all enemies cleared out that cache but left everything else.

[Fel]

The command you used probably kills the bitters and spitters and doesn't destroy the nests.
The one you want would be this one:

/c local surface=game.player.surface
for key, entity in pairs(surface.find_entities_filtered({force="enemy"})) do
	entity.destroy()
end

[Mister Dawg]

I am good at this point. Whatever I did brought my FPS/UPS back to a pretty even 60, and I'm manually eradicating remaining nests.

Thank you for the replies. I learned a lot this morning.