SLOW Performance Issues: post here to report

[haunted_i]

You say the autosave function will be worked on? That's good. Personally, I'd love an option to just turn it off. Even on relatively fast machines, once I'm 30+ turns into an AI match, the autosaving lags things by up to ten seconds, just from parsing all the replay data. Perhaps a future release could have the game simply append the latest turn's data to a single autosave file, rather than create new and progressively larger files each turn.

I may be jumping the gun since OS X Leopard isn't out yet, but have the devs given any thought to using Core Animation? From looking at the save/replay files, it's about the same thing, but would use less code and less system overhead, since it automatically takes care of interpolation, opacity, etc. The more I think about its applications for Wesnoth, the better everything could get. Smoother zooming, for one thing. The wiki page confirms it will be backwards compatible, so the game won't be lost for PPC users. "Any Core Image capable computer can run Core Animation."

[Jozrael]

Alright, this seems mildly ridiculous to me.

I'm on a ThinkPad T60 laptop. I think it's about 2GHz, I know it has dual processors, has a gig of RAM - it should easily be able to handle Wesnoth.

And it has in the past. However, due to some problems with it (possibly hardware, and ironically, possibly the RAM - I'm not a techie but evidently my school techies complain about the hardware probs on this particular model) I had to 're-image' the laptop. Basically, wipe the hard drive and put on a preset configuration (XP, antivirus, a couple of other programs). In an effort to speed up the general computer and my hardware-intensive program (BF2142) I did a base re-image which includes less programs. Unfortunately, because it's a ThinkPad, there's still 80 processes on it which take up 550 RAM. >.<

Anyways. Wesnoth ran fine til this re-image, which happened a couple days after the most recent release. So I was able to run the most recent release (I think) but then I reimaged and it had problems. Is there a program, plugin, something which speeds this up which wasn't installed this time?

This happens specifically on A Subterranean Struggle. It's alright in the beginning, but once it opens into the main room it gets unplayable in comparison to the previous.

[Vengashii]

Everytime I click a button in the lobby or campaign/scenario selection screen, it takes about thirty seconds to load. Its pretty annoying. What gives?

P.S. Operation System is Windows 2000 professional, version 1.3.1, 512 MB of RAM, and broadband. Not sure what you mean by CPU.

[wsultzbach]

Not sure what you mean by CPU.

Central Processing Unit.
The type and speed of your processor.

[Vengashii]

Well, how do i figure that out?

[Yogibear]

If you describe what i think you describe it is a time lag experienced either before entering a campaign or after choosing a multiplayer option (like join official server, host network game etc).

And i am afraid, there is little we can do at the moment. The reason is this: The unit information is very huge and split into many small separate files. It is very time consuming (for wesnoth), to read those files one by one. So we take all that information and put it into a cache file.

Every time you enter multiplayer or a campaign, that cache file is read in and provides all the relevant unit information. This is faster than reading every unit configuration file but it still takes some time. However, 30 seconds is quite a bit considering your machine.

If you download new add-ons (for example a multiplayer era) the cache needs to be rebuilt. You will notice that this can take _very_ long, especially for multiplayer, depending on what you installed already. Going for extended era, colosseum, defense of the goblin and one or two more can take up to 5 minutes of cache rebuilding. But it only happens once, after that it shouldn't take more than 5 to 10 seconds to enter multiplayer. Campaigns though might need a little longer.

This can be overcome and i already tried to work out a solution for it. But it is a time consuming task, changing code all over the application and it definitely won't go into the 1.2 branch.

[Vengashii]

Well, I sure hope it makes it into 1.3.2

[Tormy]

Hi all!

So far, I was able to play all versions of Wesnoth in proper speed.
I just downloaded and installed the latest version (1.3.2) and still single player campaigns as well as "hot seat" games work well.

During multiplayer games however, i am suffering from a freeze of about 10 seconds each time after choosing a unit to act with.

I am using a pIII @ 800mhz with 256mb of ram and a geforce 2 gts graphic adapter.

Is anyone able to help?

Thanks!

[mirelitkitten]

Hi all!

So far, I was able to play all versions of Wesnoth in proper speed.
I just downloaded and installed the latest version (1.3.2) and still single player campaigns as well as "hot seat" games work well.

During multiplayer games however, i am suffering from a freeze of about 10 seconds each time after choosing a unit to act with.

I am using a pIII @ 800mhz with 256mb of ram and a geforce 2 gts graphic adapter.

Is anyone able to help?

Thanks!

Hi!
I have the same problem with 1.3.2 , only with differenc pc :
p4 1600 Mhz, 512 mb ram , NVIDIA GEforce FX 5200.
(op. syst. win 2000 server)
The problem occures only in multiplayer games, but we were unable to play with 3 players. We had to wait 15-30 sec./unit/act.
Please help!

[dogscoff]

Yup, same problem here, except I get it in single player. Animations and mouse freeze for around 10 seconds after selecting a unit. If I move the mouse while it's frozen it will eventually respond to the movement I made, but it's extremely frustrating.

Machine is a Sony Viao pcgfx701 running XP. Never had this problem on previous versions of Wesnoth.

[viking]

I have the same issue as dogscoff with 1.3.3. I have two laptops. One is installed with the current stable release (1.2.5) and the other has 1.3.3. Both are running Windows XP and have dual-core processors and 1GB of RAM. Both have on-board graphics (the system running 1.2.5 is Intel GMA950, the one running 1.3.3 is Ati's X1150).
I'm new to Wesnoth, for my sins, so don't know what to expect in terms of performance but I think that 1.3.3 needs some attention. 1.2.5 runs exactly as would *expect* it to, in other words I'm not distracted by lags whilst I'm playing.
With 1.3.3, which is running on the superior hardware, which I would think should eat a turn-based game like this, I am also suffering from the chronic slows that other people are reporting. Map scrolling seems fine, it is definitely something to do with route calculation. When you select a character, there is a delay of up to 10 seconds or so before the little footprints appear on the map between the character and the cursor. Really laggy, and quite off-putting. Is there a solution to dealing with this?

[Alink]

The lag after selecting a unit comes probably from a pathfinding bug which uses a lot of memory operations proportional to the number of units on map. So if you don't have this lag when there is very few units, then it's surely this bug

The bug seems to have various impact on different system and different map, so its importance was not detected when releasing 1.3.3 (maybe also present on 1.3.2 but I didn't check). It was also a tiny error and because of this, I had hard time to locate it.

It's fixed on the svn trunk and so will also be fixed on 1.3.4. In the meantime, if you can compile source and want to do a small change in c++ code (add "&" character before "units" in 2 files) : here it the change to do

EDIT: Some fellow devs remind me something : If you are on windows and never compile wesnoth, be aware that it's not an easy task (I sometimes forget that not everybody is on linux, where it's easier). So, if patching this is your only plan, I suggest to not starting this and wait 1.3.4. But, of course, if it can bring freshmeat into coding or wesnoth developpement, it's also good

[viking]

Thanks for the fix on that one, I'll have a go at dabbling in the source and compiling it myself (there's a first time for everything!)

Your help is massively appreciated!!!

[MageRain]

Windows XP, Intel Core Duo 2,1 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600,
Wesnoth 1.2.6

I was playing The South Guard campagin, Tidings Good and Ill mission. Since you have only two units there I was forced to load and save a lot. It gave the effects described above: slow scroll rate, pauses at the start of turn. What I noticed is that it happens like this: enemy heals, enemy moves, your units heal and at the time you can still see green numbers floating on top of them game freezes for about 20 seconds.

I sort of put up with it, but when next mission started same freezing kept happening on the start of the turn. I believe it has something to do with auto-save, because now saving takes a lot more time that it used to.

[Sapient]

Windows XP, Intel Core Duo 2,1 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600,
Wesnoth 1.2.6

I was playing The South Guard campagin, Tidings Good and Ill mission. Since you have only two units there I was forced to load and save a lot. It gave the effects described above: slow scroll rate, pauses at the start of turn. What I noticed is that it happens like this: enemy heals, enemy moves, your units heal and at the time you can still see green numbers floating on top of them game freezes for about 20 seconds.

I sort of put up with it, but when next mission started same freezing kept happening on the start of the turn. I believe it has something to do with auto-save, because now saving takes a lot more time that it used to.

And how big is your savefile?