I need some help regarding lag when using mods.

[BlackAphid225]

I'm frequently running into the issue where I am unable to use any mods without my game lagging it seems. I'm trying to run even just Expanded Foods and Culinary Artilery and my game is lagging to hell and back. I'm sincerely not sure what I'm doing wrong. I'm not if it's the mods that are the issue or if I'm doing something wrong, I'm pretty sure I'm able to run smaller mods, atleast I was able to a while ago. Thank you.

[l33tmaan]

What does your task manager say? How's your RAM usage?

[BlackAphid225]

Sorry for the super late reply. My CPU peaks during loading and gets super high when running. My memory (that's ram right?) ends up going up to about 90% when running and peaking. Gpu also gets pretty high. My max pc ram is 12gb. I hope that's helpful information. Thank you for your help.

[Moon_Dew]

Does anyone have an answer to this?  Because I play a heavily modded game and these lag spikes are killing me!

[l33tmaan]

I always suspected that the number of mods has more impact on your game performance than the mods themselves. Yes, some mods do cause more of a performance hit than others, but just by adding a bunch of tiny mods you can easily bloat your game into eating up 12 GB of RAM. I tried figuring out if a specific mod was the issue for me, but that never seemed to be the case.

[Thorfinn]

That depends on what you mean by "lag spikes", @Moon_Dew. If your RAM is low, and you are trying to render a lot of blocks, it will be swapping to disk constantly. Is that what you are seeing? You can try lowering the view distance, but if the blocks it needs to render are fairly common, that's not going to help much. If your hard drive space is low, that throws a different kind of "lag spike". If your hard drive simply cannot keep up loading map blocks, or your CPU can't keep up mapgenning new blocks, yet more kinds of "lag spikes."

For starters, what happens with a new, completely vanilla game?

Next, go back and create a new megamod game with a lower quality preset. If you set it to low, then move the Max FPS slider up, do you see the framerate numbers going up? Do controls and movement seem good, or do they seem a little "hinky"? If that's good, try loading your existing megamod game.

Then start looking at log files.What kind of ticks are you seeing listed in server-main.txt? For example, on loading with a gazillion mods, it's not unusual to see something like,

[Warning] Server overloaded. A tick took 2746ms to complete.

But you should not see a 3 second lag or anything remotely like that any other time.

Say you see some of the greatest lag ticks are taking 700ms, and then they drop off to the 400ms range. I'd set 

/debug logticks 600

play for a bit, open server-main.txt and see if you can figure out what's going on with the worst offenders first, then work your way through lower numbers.

Though, like @l33tmaan says, I doubt you will find any particular mod doing it. It's probably just going to turn out that you don't have a beefy enough machine for what you are asking of it, or your machine setup is the bottleneck. Do you have RAM sucked up by browsers or other stuff running? Are you certain your virus scanner or malware detector isn't the cause? Etc. Way too many possibilities once we get to that level.

[EDIT]

Incidentally, I doubt you are going to be able to get acceptable performance with a highly modded game with only 12 GB RAM. And anyone who is running a heavily modded game on a hard drive, not an SSD, is going to be beating his head against a wall. True, there are some high end hard drives with massive amounts of cache that might give acceptable performance, but if you are going to be spending that kind of money, you might as well buy a SSD and a lower performance hard drive and reserve the SSD for things that need the speed.

[/EDIT]

Edited July 8, 2023 by Thorfinn

[l33tmaan]

Aw, c'mon man, my 16 GB of RAM is enough to run XCOM 2 with 470 mods and Project Zomboid with 400+ mods without choking! Little old Vintage Story should be able to handle 50 mods without getting lagspikes every 15 seconds.

[Moon_Dew]

On 7/8/2023 at 7:38 PM, l33tmaan said:

Aw, c'mon man, my 16 GB of RAM is enough to run XCOM 2 with 470 mods and Project Zomboid with 400+ mods without choking! Little old Vintage Story should be able to handle 50 mods without getting lagspikes every 15 seconds.

I wouldn't use XCOM 2 as an example, considering it's a AAA game.  But otherwise I agree with you.

[l33tmaan]

6 hours ago, Moon_Dew said:

I wouldn't use XCOM 2 as an example, considering it's a AAA game.  But otherwise I agree with you.

True, but Zomboid certainly isn't!