Game Load/Sync Slowness

[Kalzarius]

Somewhere between M and T (last week and this week), a change was made to the connection message for the server and client in which it keeps us up to date on the progress of loading the game for the client.  Aside from how our game always stops at 79.2%, this is incredibly slow.  It took us 10 times as long to load our game this week compared to last.  Our best guess is that we are being notified too frequently.  Our game, apparently, has 3 million objects of data to load, and being updated as frequently as we now are is probably what's slowing us down.

[Fiskbit]

Sorry to hear about your troubles. Some changes were recently made (in 1.999S) to the network code to fix problems some users were having with send times being higher than expected (as much as half an hour, in one case). You can read more about it here. I suspect this could be responsible for the problem.

I'm sure Chris will get to this soon enough, but it's likely he'll mention that the new shift+F3 debug information would be helpful in diagnosing this. Also, what do you mean that the game always stops at 79.2%? Does it continue to send but with a frozen counter, or does the transfer stop entirely, making you unable to load the game?

Thanks for your report. We'll do what we can to get this working for everyone!

[x4000]

THANK YOU for reporting this, I've made a last update that made it into 2.0 that will resolve it for you.  Good timing on finding this!

From the 2.0 notes:


-A new Network Sync Performance Settings section has been added to the General tab of the Settings window.  Generally players will not need to touch these settings, but it provides some advanced configuration problems to improve game sync transfer rates for those players who have performance issues with the default settings.

In your case, you'll want to go back to "100 Messages" and with Skip Batching turned on, and you'll be back to the way it was before.  Clearly that works best for you, but for a lot of other people the new way is better.  So now the settings tab has options where people can use the style that works best for them, and the tooltip in the game explains it all in more detail:

About Network Sync Performance Settings
This section will help you improve the performcen of loading/syncing games across the network, if you have having trouble.  Please note that this will have NO effect on in-game performance, just on game syncs.  The default is N/1200 Messages, with batch network sending not turned off, and this will work well for most people.

However, for those with very fast connections, the old default of 100 Messages, with batch network sending skipped, may provide better performance (these are the old defaults).  This will vary depending on your connection, though, and some people had extremely poor connection speeds even on very fast connections with the old defaults, which is why the new defaults were added.

********     OTHER OPTIONS     ********
- 1 Msg. should generally be avoided, but it might work on some connections.

- If 100 Msgs. gives you some slowdown, but not a lot, try 1000 Msgs.

- N/2400 and N/200 and N/1600 create fewer messagse than N/1200, and may provide better performance than N/1200 on fast-but-not-super connections.

- N/800 and N/400 are really only for very slow broadband connections or lower.

********     IN SUMMARY     ********
The short explanation is that if the new default gives you slowdown, then try the old default.  If that also gives you slowdown, then you can try the other entries here.

********     WHAT SORT OF CONNECTION TIMES TO EXPECT?     ********
Here are some common connection time estimates (which may naturally vary some, but you have problems if it takes more than twice as long as these stated estimates).  Bear in mind that these estimates are for a fullspeed transfer, which might not be achievable because of packet loss and other network conditions, or based on the Network Sync Size you choose.

Host 100kbps upload, 1 Client, 500KB savegame:  41s
Host 100kbps upload, 4 Clients, 500KB savegame:  2m, 44s

Host 100kbps upload, 1 Client, 1.5 MB savegame:  2m, 3s
Host 100kbps upload, 4 Clients, 1.5 MB savegame:  8m, 12s

Host 300kbps upload, 1 Client, 500KB savegame:  14s
Host 300kbps upload, 4 Clients, 500KB savegame:  54s

Host 300kbps upload, 1 Client, 1.5 MB savegame:  42s
Host 300kbps upload, 4 Clients, 1.5 MB savegame:  2m, 47s

[Revenantus]

I'll add a section to the manual explaining the new settings.

[x4000]

Okay -- that won't make 2.0 at this stage, but it's good to have in there for the future.  At the moment, it's all explained in the game itself, so that's good.

[Kalzarius]

I'm sure Chris will get to this soon enough, but it's likely he'll mention that the new shift+F3 debug information would be helpful in diagnosing this. What do you mean that the game always stops at 79.2%? Does it continue to send but with a frozen counter, or does the transfer stop entirely, making you unable to load the game?

It continues to send (though the server has WAIT: 0, which I believe means there are no more messages queued) with a frozen percentage counter.  Normally, it would be a few seconds afterwards that the game finishes loading, but in this case, it was a couple of minutes, so it was more noticeable.  Not sure why it stops at 79.2%, though.

THANK YOU for reporting this, I've made a last update that made it into 2.0 that will resolve it for you.  Good timing on finding this!

I saw that it was last call, so we decided to report everything we could before the deadline.  

Otherwise, you'd only be hearing about it now.

From the 2.0 notes:


-A new Network Sync Performance Settings section has been added to the General tab of the Settings window.  Generally players will not need to touch these settings, but it provides some advanced configuration problems to improve game sync transfer rates for those players who have performance issues with the default settings.

In your case, you'll want to go back to "100 Messages" and with Skip Batching turned on, and you'll be back to the way it was before.  Clearly that works best for you, but for a lot of other people the new way is better.  So now the settings tab has options where people can use the style that works best for them, and the tooltip in the game explains it all in more detail:

About Network Sync Performance Settings
This section will help you improve the performcen of loading/syncing games across the network, if you have having trouble.  Please note that this will have NO effect on in-game performance, just on game syncs.  The default is N/1200 Messages, with batch network sending not turned off, and this will work well for most people.

However, for those with very fast connections, the old default of 100 Messages, with batch network sending skipped, may provide better performance (these are the old defaults).  This will vary depending on your connection, though, and some people had extremely poor connection speeds even on very fast connections with the old defaults, which is why the new defaults were added.

Ah, excellent.  That will probably solve it.

[x4000]

Thanks again.  Glad to hear it wasn't game-breaking before, even if it was annoying.  And now it can be back to business as usual for you with a simple toggle there, so that's good.