Game loading/saving is really slow here

[zas]

These operations 'through Load/Save options) may take up to 1 minute. It seems it eats much cpu power and few disk accesses. Is anybody else experiencing similar behavior ?

[ettin]

These operations 'through Load/Save options) may take up to 1 minute. It seems it eats much cpu power and few disk accesses.

What computer? And operating system?

[zas]

P4 1.8Ghz
1Gb RAM
60Gb IDE HD
Matrox 550

Kernel linux 2.4.21 i686
Debian 3.0
SDL 1.2.4
gcc 2.95.4
XFree86 4.1

I don't have any other performance issue on this system. I started wesnoth 0.4 from rxvt terminal.

[Dave]

I am going to look at speeding up loading and saving because they are a little slow, although they don't take up anywhere near to a minute on my system.

Some more questions:

- is this only mid-level saving that takes alot of time? What about when you save the game at the end of a scenario?
- which scenario are you saving in? Which turn of the scenario?
- does saving really take as long as loading? I can imagine loading taking a while, but saving shouldn't take long at all

David

[zas]

I am going to look at speeding up loading and saving because they are a little slow, although they don't take up anywhere near to a minute on my system.

Some more questions:

- is this only mid-level saving that takes alot of time? What about when you save the game at the end of a scenario?
same and long
- which scenario are you saving in? Which turn of the scenario?
ie 1.4 2.6 2.16
- does saving really take as long as loading? I can imagine loading taking a while, but saving shouldn't take long at all

saving and loading are both very slow ( > 1minute CPU 100%)

David

[fmunoz]

In my sistem it just take about 1/2 second ...

Mandrake 9.0
Athlon 1400+
40 Gb disk
XFree 4.3
SDL 1.2
ATI Radeon 7500 at -> 16bpp/24bpp
512 Mb RAM

[Dave]

Okay, that's rather strange.

I may insert some output to the console in a development version, so you can tell us exactly which part of the loading/saving takes so long, zas.

But saving in particular should be a fairly trivial process, I can't see why it'd take so long...

David

[zas]

I will try to figure why

[zas]

First save is fast, but more you advance in campaign, slower is the saving,
after some time it becames > 1mn.

[fmunoz]

MAybe the save file grows too much, every "in-level" save stores all movements from the start of the current level to the moment of the save.
Try to "prune" the save file or rename it.
A dialog to manage saves will be a good idea.

[Dave]

I can't imagine the save file taking more than a few megabytes, even in extreme situations. Such file sizes should be a piece of cake for modern hardware.

Yes the facility to delete saves would be a good idea. Unfortunately writing your own user interface from scratch is hard work

David

[zas]

When i'll have some time, i will try to identify the issue.

[Guillaume]

Hi,

I've got the same problem on the Windows binary version 0.4.0
The more you save, the longer it takes.

Guillaume

[Dave]

Question:

When loading a saved game, does it take a long time to load up the dialog box with the list of the saved games, or does it only take a long time once you've selected the game to load?

How big is your 'save' file?

Can one of you send your 'save' file to me or put it up on the web so I can download it?

David

[Guillaume]

Well David,

I'll send you by email my save file.
This file is actually 268 Kb large, at it long to load between the time I click on the "load" button until the window with saved game list appear (almost 20 seconds for only 6 game saved)!
But once the saved game is choosen, it is almost immediate to display the game screen.

Regards.
Guillaume