Help me to boost my oni perf

[Flydo]

So i will explain, the biggest problem i have it's the saving time between each cycle, take a long long time (map 95 % discover, cycle 4700, 24 dupe)

The saving time ruin my game experience (all the rest is quite smoothie), it's getting worse only when i have a bigger big base (Note: I prefer to don't use mod, except if it's the only solution)

Intel(R)_Core(TM)_i7-6700_CPU_@_3.40GHz

8Go RAM DDR4 at 1066 MHz with a clock at about 3900 MHz

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

ONI is on a SSD

[ExEvolution]

The save optimizer mod helps a little bit, but I think the best thing you can do is to reduce the number of debris on the map. From what I understand, when a two different piles of debris exist, it has to save temperature for each stack, but if you reduce the number of stacks from 2 to 1, even if the quantity of material was the same, it only has to save half as many temperature values

[Nedix]

My ONI is on an M.2 SSD, 16GB RAM, i7 CPU and also a GTX970. The only option I found reliable enough is indeed to clean up the debris around the map. Every once in a while, for 5-10 cycles I just clean up the map. 

[SharraShimada]

As mentioned, try the save optimizer, it removes old reports and makes the file smaller. Less file, less time. 

In addition, go to the games options, and set the auto-save to 2 cycles, instead of every. You may loose more, if your game runs unstable, but its only half as annoying.

[Flydo]

Thank for the information, i will try to clean my map a little more and maybe store the material in a container for only one material (this maybe could help)

I will also try to configure an autosave to 2 cycles (or more)

At first, i just thinking that i need more RAM to run it smoothly, did you think this could help too?

[SharraShimada]

32 minutes ago, Flydo said:

At first, i just thinking that i need more RAM to run it smoothly, did you think this could help too?

At a certain point, yes. If you have 8GB its not really enough for late game play. 16GB seems to be okay, but ONI can consume 12-14GB. Depending what your system needs beside ONI, it can result in a problem. But thats nothing that boosts your performance, just prevent your game from crashing from out of memory. More RAM is like more seats in your car. It wont run faster with it. You can just stuff more people into it. 

ONI tends to consume more and more RAM over time. If you just make a save, quit and restart, there is always plenty RAM free to use again. You can expand that time with more RAM, but it wont run much smoother.

[Cipupec2]

1 hour ago, SharraShimada said:

But thats nothing that boosts your performance, just prevent your game from crashing from out of memory. More RAM is like more seats in your car. It wont run faster with it.

That is not accurate. Your system can and will use hardrive pagefile to supplement for lack of physical memory, which would result in massive performance hit.  

OP, SSD of the same type of storage interface can vary widely in performance, I had a SSD on laptop from which I replaced few years later with a more mature product and performance sky rocketed

[ExEvolution]

Page file really only impacts performance if you don't have enough memory, and its really going to be in performance of the underlying system. not so much the game. If you have 8GB RAM and your game is using 8GB, then other parts of your system in memory will be moved to the page file to free up physical memory for the application. This will impact performance of the applications or the operating system when switching tasks, because that information has to be pulled from the page file back to memory before it can be processed by the CPU.

Your game itself won't be impacted by the performance if it stays active, but if you task switch, then the game can be swapped to disk. If you only have 8GB but then the game tries to request more than 8GB you are going to run into issues, it is probably going to crash because it doesn't really have more than 8GB to work with.

So adding more memory will not impact performance as much unless the game can actually request more memory than it is currently using. I've never seen ONI use more than 12GB myself but its possible I guess. Having more memory will improve the overall performance and stability of your system however, especially when task switching

[Cipupec2]

36 minutes ago, ExEvolution said:

Page file really only impacts performance if you don't have enough memory, and its really going to be in performance of the underlying system.

When low on RAM memory the system start to rely more on the much slower hard-drives, as you say this is most notice able when task switching (for example to browser) but this also impact hard-drive performance (IO, cache) by underlying system elements working in the background (particularly when using non SSD on cluttered system with split pagefile - which isn't the case here) but can effect save time which is the prime concern of the OP here. Also some programs does fun stuff during save time that can increase memory foot print .. loop to above.

[cpy]

17 hours ago, ExEvolution said:

The save optimizer mod helps a little bit, but I think the best thing you can do is to reduce the number of debris on the map. From what I understand, when a two different piles of debris exist, it has to save temperature for each stack, but if you reduce the number of stacks from 2 to 1, even if the quantity of material was the same, it only has to save half as many temperature values

Can you link to that mod? I can't seem to find it.

[SharraShimada]

Sure, when it comes to swapping, more RAM will help. But while there is no swapping, more RAM wont boost anything at all. Its just more. The uses amount wont work faster because its more available. As long as the system does not use all of the RAM, you gain nothing from even more unused memory. Its just there, doing nothing.

[ExEvolution]

42 minutes ago, cpy said:

Can you link to that mod? I can't seem to find it.

Here ya go! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1867707267

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 9/1/2020 at 1:02 PM, ExEvolution said:

Your game itself won't be impacted by the performance if it stays active, but if you task switch, then the game can be swapped to disk. If you only have 8GB but then the game tries to request more than 8GB you are going to run into issues, it is probably going to crash because it doesn't really have more than 8GB to work with.

So adding more memory will not impact performance as much unless the game can actually request more memory than it is currently using. I've never seen ONI use more than 12GB

With Windows 10 and 8gb of RAM, I hit the swap file fairly consistently.  Every time a system process needed to take action, the game would stutter as memory was swapped to and from the swapfile.  On Linux with 8gb of RAM, there wasn't as much stuttering, but I still quickly hit the swap file.  In both cases it was nearly impossible to open up Chrome while ONI was running.  My experience is that ONI is definitely playable with 8gb of RAM, but its right on the edge and trying to run any other application can cause problems.

At 12gb of RAM, things were just fine under both Windows and Linux until late in the game.  Early on, it was fine to have Chrome open in another screen, but late in the game it could hit the swap file even if ONI was the only user program running.  

With 16gb of RAM, Windows 10 would still occasionally farm system processes off to the swap file.  I don't know the methodology that WIndows uses; perhaps it tries to keep 10% of RAM free.  *shrug*  Anyway, under Linux, with 16gb of RAM, I routinely run ONI, Chrome, and a virtual machine simultaneously without ever* hitting the swap file.

 

One final addendum: I haven't performed these comparisons since the load file memory leak issue was corrected.  The above are observations I made while trying to track down a crash issue that, ultimately, was because ONI wasn't correctly freeing up all of its RAM when loading a new save file.  The above is information from initial load and play, and not taken from the data I collected from loading maps consecutively.

 

* Not completely true.  If you have, say, 50 tabs and 3 browser windows open, and ONI is in the 1000+ cycle stage of the game, you can still hit the swap.

[ExEvolution]

@KittenIsAGeek I just find it hard to believe ONI is using much RAM at all because it typically runs below 4GB for me and I have tons of mods installed. The biggest memory issues come from certain mods that cause memory leaks.

Current usage on cycle 529 with over 85% of the map uncovered.

 

Just for reference though, here are my specs

• Intel Core i7 5930k @ 4.5GHz
• 32GB DDR4 3000 in quad channel configuration
• GeForce 980ti
• Intel 750 Series SSD 400GB as OS drive
• Samsung SSD Pro 1TB as storage / game drive

Game runs about 15 fps on 3x speed and about 30fps on 1x speed

[SharraShimada]

ONI has some problems freeing RAM while in use. Thats a known issue, even in vanilla (mods can make it worse though). When is load a big save of mine, it consumes around 5gigs of RAM  After a few hours is can go up to 12gig. It sums up over time. A save-quit-restart every 1 or 2 hours solves this.

[Flydo]

Thank to all i will buy new RAM for my computer too

[TheMule]

On 9/1/2020 at 9:02 PM, ExEvolution said:

If you only have 8GB but then the game tries to request more than 8GB you are going to run into issues, it is probably going to crash because it doesn't really have more than 8GB to work with.

No process uses all its memory at the same time. So ONI may actually allocate 12GB of memory, and the system keeps 4GB on disk (well, no, there's always a slice of the RAM the OS keeps for itself of course, so it's going to be more than 4GB). It's called pagefile (as opposed to swapfile) because the time when entire processes were swapped to disk are long gone. Whether to keep something in RAM or on disk is decided at page level, based on their usage. Of course, processes not running don't touch their pages and eventually they are moved to disk almost entirely. But when they are re-activated, only the pages they really use are moved back to RAM.

And of course it's a oversimplified version of it, the actual algorithms are more sophisticated than that.

 

 

[thewreckedangle]

i don't really know much about any of this but i have an i5, 16GB RAM and i play ONI with discord,origin,epic,and usually some small game like PvZ or Viridi open behind and the simpsons playing on my second monitor. i set my save to 5 cycles and no timelapse. i cant say i notice much lag or whatever, but i tend to not have 100's of dupes (however i usually end up with like 400 various hatches) but you guys maybe know i am obsessed with tidiness so there is never debris on the floor.

[melquiades]

People seem to love to argue about how much ram you really need to play the game, but never pay attention to the kind of memory, speed and maybe channel configuration of it.

[ExEvolution]

1 hour ago, melquiades said:

People seem to love to argue about how much ram you really need to play the game, but never pay attention to the kind of memory, speed and maybe channel configuration of it.

ONI is just not that memory intensive. My colony I reaching 1000 cycles now and it is still using about 4gb ram. Memory usage only seems to go up with poorly made mods that are leaking memory. The biggest impact on performance spec wise is single core CPU performance. Like I mentioned earlier, I've got 32gb ddr4 3000mhz ram in quad channel configuration, and performance is terrible mostly due to pathfinding. If I run at 2x or 3x speed, duplicants start to lag and take several seconds just to pick the next errand and decide which path to take to get there. With my 6 core, 12 thread CPU at 4.5ghz, 24 duplicants and 150+ critters is unplayable at 3x speed, and manageable but inefficient at 2x speed. Pathfinding and errand selection gets progressively slower the more units that exist and the more errands they can select from.

 

The number of errands can be reduced by finishing an area of construction before moving on, sweeping your base, and automating shipping lines.

 

Memory speed and quantity has almost no impact on performance, as long as you have enough

[TehPlayer14]

On 9/3/2020 at 7:52 PM, SharraShimada said:

ONI has some problems freeing RAM while in use. Thats a known issue, even in vanilla (mods can make it worse though). When is load a big save of mine, it consumes around 5gigs of RAM  After a few hours is can go up to 12gig. It sums up over time. A save-quit-restart every 1 or 2 hours solves this.

I had this I bought more Ram from 16GB to 64GB and it looks like... it was some kind of memory leak...

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 9/13/2020 at 4:47 PM, ExEvolution said:

With my 6 core, 12 thread CPU at 4.5ghz, 24 duplicants and 150+ critters is unplayable at 3x speed,

First, that's sad.  My quad-core, 4 thread i5 at 3.2ghz does better than that.  

Second.. From what I've been able to tell, ONI really only uses two cores.

Spoiler

Yes, all 4 cores are in use, but that's simply two threads and some CPU scheduling overhead.

38% of 4 processing cores is 1.52, which is a better approximation.  So ONI uses about one and a half cores of processing power.  

Your processor speed does make a difference, but its been my experience that the memory bandwidth has a greater impact.  With your quad-channel RAM setup, you should be having a better experience than you claim.

On 9/13/2020 at 4:47 PM, ExEvolution said:

Memory speed and quantity has almost no impact on performance, as long as you have enough

My system runs ONI much better in three-channel memory mode than it does in single-channel (Yes, my system is odd. I don't have quad-channel architecture).  So I disagree with your assessment about memory speed.

Is it possible to share your save file so that I can load it and evaluate the performance on my system? 

[SharraShimada]

36 minutes ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

First, that's sad.  My quad-core, 4 thread i5 at 3.2ghz does better than that.  

 

This sounds familiar... i5 4460? I do run that model and it works just fine with ony until i start to clutter the space biome with solar panels, bunker doors, sweepers and rails. But its still playable then. Sure it does not provide eleven trillion FPS on 16k resolution, but thats not the way i play.

[KittenIsAGeek]

Close.  Its an i5-4690S.  I purchased the S (low power) model because at the time I wanted to make a passively-cooled system.  Turned out great.

[ExEvolution]

On 9/17/2020 at 3:22 PM, KittenIsAGeek said:

First, that's sad.  My quad-core, 4 thread i5 at 3.2ghz does better than that.  

Second.. From what I've been able to tell, ONI really only uses two cores.

  Hide contents

Yes, all 4 cores are in use, but that's simply two threads and some CPU scheduling overhead.

38% of 4 processing cores is 1.52, which is a better approximation.  So ONI uses about one and a half cores of processing power.  

Your processor speed does make a difference, but its been my experience that the memory bandwidth has a greater impact.  With your quad-channel RAM setup, you should be having a better experience than you claim.

My system runs ONI much better in three-channel memory mode than it does in single-channel (Yes, my system is odd. I don't have quad-channel architecture).  So I disagree with your assessment about memory speed.

Is it possible to share your save file so that I can load it and evaluate the performance on my system? 

I can share my save file, but I run mods and I also make big builds, so I accept that performance is going to suffer. I've uploaded the save, preview image, and mods.json so you can try to mimic my setup

Stuffed Pucker.sav mods.json