Performance issues(lag spikes)

[David Petersen]

Hello, I’m having some performance issues and hope to figure out if this is something that can be fixed or whether it is simply a hardware issue on my end.

 

To be more specific, the issue I’m having is some very large and often lethal lag spikes. I’m ok with running the game at an average 30FPS as the official system requirements suggests I should be able to, but I’m not too happy about having these lag spikes occur.

 

Here is the report;

 

• The type of lag: Overally low framerate, short or long lag spikes?

  • Depending on the graphics settings, but at high settings I can average around 30-60 FPS, depends on what I do in the game. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but that is what the number in the top right corner says(ctrl + F3). I guess the AVG number is an average of the FPS over a short amount of time?!

  • The spikes are high/long on the graph but short in duration. Meaning the FPS drops a lot for a short time.

• Is it Client or Server lag:

  • Client lag symptoms: The framerate will be low or the screen will be frozen for short or longer durations.

    • The screen will freeze for 1-2 seconds. The frequency depends on graphics settings, especially the viewing distance, but even on the lowest viewing distance I still get these lag spikes.

  • Server lag symptoms: A disconnected icon on the top right corner, have blocks reappearing, animals not moving, broken blocks taking a while before their drops appear

    • The issue occurs on a singleplayer map.

If its client lag

• Whats the framerate and fps graph look like? (hit CTRL+F3 to see)

  • See the attached Screen shot - Nr. 1 and Nr. 2

• Whats your graphics settings and what graphics card and RAM capacity do you have?

  • I have mostly played with high settings, but have tried to lower it. Like I mentioned above, the spikes still occur at lower settings although it is less frequent. The screenshots and data supplied are all from high settings.

  • I have turned the Occlusion culling off, but I see no difference whether it is on or off.

  • I have 8GB of memory.

  • My GPU is a NVIDIA Corporation GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti]

• Whats the current memory usage? How long have you been playing? Is it single player or multiplayer?

  • I have played for nearly 10 hours on this map.

  • The total memory usage is around 6.5 – 7.0 GB out of 7.74 available (see screenshot - Memory usage)

  • It is a singleplayer map.

• Make a screenshot of the frame profiler output (hit CTRL+F10 to toggle). Before screenshotting please also type the command .edi to get additional frame profiler output.

  • See screenshot Nr. 3

• On just individual lag spikes, please run the command .debug logticks 20 if you are usually above 60 fps, or .debug logticks 40 if you are usually above 30 fps. Let it run for a while and then send us the client-main.txt, it's found in %appdata%/VintagestoryData/Logs. Run the same command again to disable the logging. Please make sure that here too, extended debug info (via .edi) is enabled.

  • I’m unsure how to perform this step?!

  • I ran the command, but don’t know how to run it on individual lag spikes.

  • I don’t know where the log file is located. I am on Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon.

    • I tried looking in /home/[username]/.local and the /home folders but without any luck.

  • Please clarify and I will provide the log ASAP.

• Pc Specs

  • OS - Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon

    • I installed the game via the official instructions using Mono.

  • CPU - Intel© Pentium© CPU G4560 @ 3.50GHz × 2

  • GPU - NVIDIA Corporation GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti]

    • nvidia-driver-470 Version 470.57.02-0ubuntu0.20.04.1

  • Memory 8GB

  • Harddrive - 1TB HDD(plenty of free space)

 

I hope this helps.

Egnaar

[thinkbutwith3xs]

I have this issue as well; it seems to be something related with the disk usage when (I assume) the game periodically saves, as any time these occur my disk write usage shoots up at least a few MB/s, as much as around 20. I have a hard disk as well, and if there is any way to change where the game saves and loads world files I would test if the same problem persists with my SSD but I don't know how to do that.

[Thalius]

I have been seeing the same, as have some others on our online server. I attributed it to connection issues perhaps until others said they were seeing the same things going on and thought maybe a mod was part of the issue. After reading this post though, I'm not so sure.  Also seeing a lot of "rubber-banding", seemingly when these lag spikes occur.

Edited September 14, 2021 by Thalius

[Windego]

Have any one of you experienced any changes as of the last time this post was made?
I've had this in the past few versions quite often, though more often than not it was related to the option to optimize RAM. Disabling that seemed to fix most of the lag spikes.
As of 1.15.7 I've yet to experience it.

[thinkbutwith3xs]

It seems to be the same since I last remember. I've had the memory optimization option disabled and still do.

[thinkbutwith3xs]

It's definitely an issue with writing too much to a hard disk drive. I decided to try just moving the save folder to my SSD and linking it to where VS normally saves, and now the spikes are negligible, if even noticeable, while the disk usage still reports jumps of multiple megabyte writes.