Is it true strip-mining causes fps problems?

[Lycan]

So I've been looking online and I can't get a straight answer so I'm hoping people here are more knowledgeable; is it true strip-mining levels can cause severe FPS problems? Older posts on the original game forums and stuff on the wiki says it can "Cause Pathing issues which can lead to FPS drops" but then there's other articles saying that removing several levels of rock can drop the FPS permanently because the game constantly "checks" those empty tiles.

Ultimately I really want to mine a few levels clear and use the resources but I'm not sure if it's a good idea if it permanently will drain like 50% of the FPS for the rest of the fort. A few articles say if you "block off those levels" by building walls around the stairs and preventing access that will fix the issue, does anyone know if that's true?

[topheron]

A quick note about strip mining... if all those boulders are distinct items in the game, each boulder will be checked regularly for temperature, etc, by the main program loop. This causes FPS death due to too many items.

If you were atom smashing all your boulders, then, according to what Putnam has been profiling, empty levels aren't a significant cause of FPS death, especially compared to 'dwarfs seeing other dwarfs', pathfinding being blocked, water and lava calculations, etc.

[Fletch]

SDL2 public test up on the "experimental" beta branch on steam (better performance for high-res monitors, more perf settings, better performance overall, music modding)

4. An even more experimental than the rest of this update "multithreading" option, which multithreads line-of-sight calculations (seriously, these are so huge). If you see an issue, try to replicate it with and without multithreading on. It is not exactly easy to tell what issues are threading issues, haha. FPS improvements I've measured are about 20% (+-10).

Putnam is doing a great job cranking out fixes.

[harlequin_corps]

So I had a recent playthrough where my FPS dropped to 4 and stayed there. I embarked on a 4x6 with a volcano. After calming a lot of things down and dumping magma on all the water inlets of cavern 1 I had the brilliant idea of attempting to start a tree farm on the lowest Z level of cavern 1. This meant attempting to channel out about 7 or 8 Z levels of the entire map.
It definitely tanked the FPS. I stuck with it for about 4 real time days before I finally threw in the towel.
Thing is, it doesn't really make sense. you have many many Z level aboveground that are open air, why would establishing essentially a smaller version of the same thing above ground cause an FPS drop.
Granted I had started the dig with about 600 pop. And my method was to first stair dig the entire area so 8 Z layers of stairs dug out to a full 4x6.
I honestly think that embarking smaller is the way to go. Currently I have a 2x2 with 350 pop and am staying at 30 fps.