Major performance issues

[Minotaar]

Hello everyone. I haven't played AI War since about 5.016, and when I went ahead and tried to run the game yesterday, I was surprised at the load time, which was I'd say 10+ times longer than I was used to (and this was even before I updated to the new version). After the update the problems persisted, the time to load a save is also about 10-20 times longer, the planet view takes about 3s to load everything, the galaxy view appears over about 20s. I really can't play the game like this, it's so annoying.
So I wonder, what could possibly make it so broken? No hardware changes since I last played, and my machine runs recent things like BF3 and Skyrim okay. If anyone knows what could be the cause of this, please help, I really wanna play 

[Wanderer]

Can you give more information on your system and setup?  I've got almost no problems running the game until I had 6k+ ships on screen in a system and even then it was only occassional pauses when I zoomed in tight and gave commands to 3k+ in ships.

[keith.lamothe]

Can you try installing 5.000 ( http://www.arcengames.com/w/index.php/aiwar-downloads ) separately and trying that?  If that's way faster than 5.020 then the problem might be on our side, but if it's just as slow then it's probably something you're not aware of slowing down your machine (that wasn't there when you last played) or something like that.

Not saying we don't make mistakes, but 5.020's been out for a while and I don't recall anyone else mentioning this, and I haven't noticed it when I run the game

[Minotaar]

I've got a Intel Q9400 (quad core 3.0 GHz IIRC), 4GB ram (32-bit Win7 though, so ~3.3GB effective RAM if i understand correctly), a GTX460 for video. Everything worked totally fine just a couple months ago. I'm running from Steam, if that makes a difference.
Just measured:
The game loads in 113 seconds
Loading an old save of mine took about 85 seconds
I actually took several hundred ships and threw them into battle, and it runs fine. Seems like the problems are with the hard drive I/O
Keith: I'll try that and get back here.

[Minotaar]

Tried installing 5.000, difference is negligible (loads in ~100s). Anyone got ideas on what could be causing this?

[keith.lamothe]

Thanks for testing on 5.000.  It does sound like the game is slowing way down on file i/o.  Are any of your other programs experiencing this problem?  I'm no expert on tech-support, but a few other thoughts:

- Check to see if other programs running on your machine are hogging resources, particularly disk i/o.  For general "what is running?" intel I suggest Process Explorer ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653 ), for "what is hitting my disk?" I suggest Diskmon ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896646 ).

- If it's not software-is-hogging-the-disk and you know what your hdd read/write speeds (both for large-sequential and many-small-non-sequential cases) are supposed to be you could use a benchmark (I've used AS SSD, which works for non-SSD disks too, explanation at: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?58059-AS-SSD-Benchmark and download link: http://alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?cat_id=4&file_id=9 ) to measure what you're currently getting.  If you're getting bad hdd performance all across the board, then perhaps the unit was actually damaged by wear or power surge or other accident since you last played AIW.

- If neither of those show anything, then I guess it's possible that some security program is giving AIW a hard time whenever it wants to read from the disk, but I don't recall seeing that happen before.  Network I/O, sure.  Disk write?  Sometimes.  Disk read?  Seems unlikely.

[Minotaar]

Thanks a lot, Keith!  Running the benchmark now, will probably post results here (looks like it's going to take a while) as I can't really determine much from the stats it gives.
Process Explorer and Diskmon don't seem to show anything suspicious. I am not running an antivirus of any kind, so that's out of question too. And no, I believe I haven't seen any problems like this before with other programs
Wiil try to shove AI War on my Eee PC netbook just for funsies and see if it can even load there 

[Minotaar]

So, I installed in on the netbook, and hilariously enough, it works better than on the desktop I would even play on that, but 1024x600 is... err... not ideal for this game. 
Actually, I noticed something. When I run the game on the desktop, first a white window appears, which then moves around for several pixels a few times, with (Not Responding) in the title bar. This lasts for 20-30 seconds, after that the game proceeds to load. On the netbook it is straight to the black loading screen (which is I think how it always was and is supposed to be). What could possibly be going on there?

[zoutzakje]

on a side note, I did notice some difference in the initial loading time (right after launching the game) somewhere between 5.000 and 5.020.  It takes somewhat longer for the game to load (about 10-15 seconds longer), but that's only the very first loading and it doesn't bother me, so I didn't think it was worth mentioning. Rest of the game runs smooth, as usual.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, yea, if it loads faster on the netbook there's something strange on the desktop

In theory, if the AIW files were heavily fragmented on disk that would add in a lot of extra seek times to reading them and thus increase load time.  But if it was working fine before and you didn't move the files since then, I don't see how they could have increased in fragmentation.  How full is your hard drive?

[Minotaar]

On C: where Steam installs the stuff, I have 9 out of 78 GB free. The windows defrag tool says it is 11% fragmented.
Hovewer, I installed 5.000 on D:, which has 161/387 GB free and is fragmented 3%.
And they both work pretty similarly (badly).
Attaching the benchmark results. I don't know what to make of them, but looks terrifying for some reason 
My HDD is a 500gb WD Caviar Green.

[tigersfan]

Whoa, if I'm reading that right, that's your problem. From what I can tell, the Caviar Green is an external drive? If so, that's your problem, external drives are slower than internal ones.

[tigersfan]

Also, being an external drive would explain the 80 MB/s, which is,.... well...  not great.

[Minotaar]

It is not an external drive for sure. http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=120 I might not remember the exact model correctly, but it is a 500gb Western Digital drive.
I tried installing on an external drive, the game won't even load properly.

[eRe4s3r]

Heh.. this is one of these issues where i'd love to fly over to your location and take a look at it.

Benchmark proves nothing is wrong with the drive and OS drivers (related to the drive, anyway)
The question is, have you installed some audio or graphics driver lately? What about chipset drivers.

And what USB devices do you have attached?