1.6.4 Chunk Complexity (SSP) (Monster)

[Mash]

So, I've been playing on my world for awhile now, and unsurprisingly, I've begun to notice a bit of... well, the best way I can describe it is view-drag. My fps is fine for the most part, but occasionally when I'm looking around or turning, I get a laggy sensation, almost like my mouse is responding slower than it ought to. It honestly reminds me of using one of the old-school mechanical mice with a really terrible ball.

Of course, it's not a mouse issue, or I wouldn't be here. Going into a new world completely erases the sensation. I'm pretty sure it's client lag due to overly-complicated chunks.

Now, the first thing anyone jumps to with regards to chunk lag are chunk loaders. I do indeed have chunk loaders, but I only have two active at the moment. Originally I had 5 going, but I took down three, including one I had in the Nether. This had little to no visible impact on performance.

I have a number of things that might be causing lag, including a moderately-sized item-duct based auto-sort and storage room made up of JABBA barrels, although I haven't had this running since I've noticed the issue. I also have three MFR planters and harvesters with tin upgrades working on automated potato farms which transfer the potatoes via itemducts and enderchests. These are powered by redstone flux. I also have an MFR tree farm with a copper upgrade and a matching harvester.

The bio material from these farms goes to two MFR BioReactors that are connected by fluiduct to a large Dynamic Liquid Tank.

I've also got a number of conveyor belts, a mob essence tank similar to my biofuel tank, a pretty standard setup of TE machines powered by capacitor banks which are in turn fueled by a small solid fueled boiler next to my tree farm.

This is just a general idea of what my loaded chunks look like. I understand that it's pretty limited information. I just really need to know what items/blocks tend to cause the most chunk updates that would slow down my SSP world, particularly out of what I mentioned. You should also probably know that my FTB client has 4G of dedicated ram.

 

[asb3pe]

I had a bad lag issue with Monster, every time I would leave my base and go far away, my game would freeze up for about 5 seconds when I returned home (while the chunks containing my base loaded in). Very annoying. I eventually figured it out, it was my Cursed Earth mob farm causing it. I removed it completely and didn't have the lag anymore. My farm was pretty big (10x10 spawning pads stacked from bedrock to sea level in a single chunk LOL).

I assume you would have mentioned it if you've build a mob farm, but I'll tell you my story anyways. (Edit: Uh oh - you DID mention "a mob essence tank"... now I'm suspicious)

Also, I had an issue with Thermal Expansion and their conduits in Monster. In case you haven't noticed, they removed conduits from TE in 1.7 and they still haven't released "new and improved" conduits yet. The reason I mention this is because I have always suspected that the conduits were "causing trouble". But the TE folks would probably take issue with that conclusion, so I have no proof, it is merely my opinion. I had many instances of liquids "duplicating" when sent or received via the TE conduits. I'd use thousands of buckets of a fluid, and yet the Railcraft Tank liquid level wouldn't drop at all. It was pretty convenient, actually, but...

 

[Mash]

Well, I have a mob farm, but it shouldn't be overly-intensive. I just needed enough essence to run the occasional Endermen or Blaze grinder, depending on what I needed. The mob farm is just an old-school natural mob spawn dark area where the mobs are transported to a grinder. It's very low-maintenance and only processes a few mobs a minute.

My base is powered entirely by RF and I'm using Leadstone energy conduits to transport it, which may be an issue. But yeah, I'm just looking for any way at the moment to tune down my lag. It's not overly-disruptive yet, but I have plans to expand, which could lead to disruptive lag later.

 

[rhn]

Your problem sounds very very familiar. I tend to get this also, though usually only after a much more complex and extended base.

I have tried running Opis, the shift+F3 debug screen and removing various things etc. and it always comes down to 90-95+% rendering issues with all the complex tileentities and other stuff. And in the end there is really nothing I can do about that except not build(building is the game, so...) or buy a better computer(been too cheap up until now).


You really don't need to worry about chunkloaders. They will only marginally contribute to a performance degradation in singleplayer. The rendering issue will by far bog you down first.


One thing you should ALWAYS be aware of IMO is any mobs or animals forced together in confined spaces. This wreaks havoc for the "server" and fps. If you have animals fenced they should have at least 1.5-2 blocks space per animal. Also make sure there are no villages in loading range that starts breeding out of control(usually due to villagers being stuck in a house on mountainous terrain).

 

[Mash]

One thing you should ALWAYS be aware of IMO is any mobs or animals forced together in confined spaces. This wreaks havoc for the "server" and fps. If you have animals fenced they should have at least 1.5-2 blocks space per animal. Also make sure there are no villages in loading range that starts breeding out of control(usually due to villagers being stuck in a house on mountainous terrain).

This is a possibility.

My mob spawner, while not very large, does use conveyor belts to push multiple mobs in front of an MFR grinder. I have plenty of essence, so I may just shut it down for a little while, and see if that helps.
Additionally, I have a tree breeding box with a number of butterflies, but I'm not sure that's quite the same thing, and it's also not chunkloaded most of the time.

Overall, I have a feeling that this problem is an inevitability from using such a massive modpack. I'm just trying to do all I can to delay the inevitable at this point, because I'm with you in that my joy in this game comes from building the way I want to build. If I can't do that, I may as well not play.

 

[Mash]

Apologies for the double post, but I actually wanted someone's opinion on this.

Spoiler

So, that's my potato farm. It's three 9x9 segments with Lilypads of Fertility in the center, all on top of Fertilized Dirt. The growth rate is pretty high.

So that's 240 potential chunk updates with wildly increased probability from the growth accelerators that are all potentially coinciding on ticks. I'm thinking that this and my free farm are causing the issue, but due to the fact that trees only have one growth process, whereas potatoes have what, three?

I'm only using the potatoes for increased efficiency in my bioreactor, but it honestly would be no great loss to get rid of them.

Thoughts? I'm really hoping to isolate one or two really big contributors to this unresponsiveness.

 

[Someone Else 37]

Two things: With one exception, MRF is pretty non-laggy. I'd be more worried about the rendering caused by all those fences than your potato farms. And rhn's probably right in that rendering-caused client lag is probably what you're running into here. If your lag was caused by server-end stuff, such as gazillions of items bouncing around in opaque itemducts (type /cofh tps to check this) (transparent itemducts would cause rendering lag, too), you'd probably see more things like you'd see on a laggy multiplayer server- blocks taking a long time to break, suddenly being teleported back in time a few seconds, etc. However, I've never actually seen this on singleplayer, so I can't say for sure.

The other thing: That exception is actually the planter when chopping trees. Whenever it breaks a block (which it does many times in quick succession when a tree grows) it produces a shower of particles. Turning the harvester sounds off in your MFR config, incidentally, prevents this. For some reason, the vanilla Minecraft block-breaking-particle effect is tied to the block-breaking-sound effect, so you can't turn one off without the other.

So try disabling MFR harvester sounds, and if that doesn't work, backup your world and take out all the spams of fences/microparts/Carpenters blocks/other render-heavy blocks. Ducts, conduits, and the like shouldn't be a problem unless you're using thousands of them for decoration. Even lava-filled-fluiduct strip lights shouldn't be a problem.

 

[Mash]

Fences are server-intensive? I actually had no idea. Is that exclusive to fences, or does that apply to many/all half/micro blocks? Guess it's time to get a wand of equal exchange and fix that, since it's an easy fix. The MFR sound option is also an easy fix that I wouldn't miss at all.

Either way, thank you. I'll try these out and see if it works.

 

[Someone Else 37]

I said (or at least intended to say) that fences and other blocks with fancy rendering (that is, pretty much anything that's not a boring opaque cube, but more so for things with many surfaces, such as fences) can lag your client if you have lots and lots of them sitting around.

I *think* that Carpenter's blocks and microblocks are probably worse than vanilla (or probably Railcraft, for that matter) decorative blocks for the server because they're tile entities, as opposed to the simple ID:meta blocks that Vanilla uses everywhere, and therefore use more memory (if not CPU as well) to keep track of.

I'd try the MRF thing first, simply because it's easier to do and easier to reverse if it doesn't help. But yeah, Wand of Equal Tradeing the fences into cobblestone or dirt or something is probably the easiest way to go about that change.

 

[Mash]

I said (or at least intended to say) that fences and other blocks with fancy rendering (that is, pretty much anything that's not a boring opaque cube, but more so for things with many surfaces, such as fences) can lag your client if you have lots and lots of them sitting around.

I *think* that Carpenter's blocks and microblocks are probably worse than vanilla (or probably Railcraft, for that matter) decorative blocks for the server because they're tile entities, as opposed to the simple ID:meta blocks that Vanilla uses everywhere, and therefore use more memory (if not CPU as well) to keep track of.

I'd try the MRF thing first, simply because it's easier to do and easier to reverse if it doesn't help. But yeah, Wand of Equal Tradeing the fences into cobblestone or dirt or something is probably the easiest way to go about that change.

When I disabled that setting, the effect was pretty immediate. Instantly a huge portion of the lag disappeared. I noticed in my debug screen that GameRenderer is now a significantly larger portion, and I'm guessing that's at least partly because of all the fences. But, I definitely do not need fencing, and am currently Thauming it up for my wand. Thanks a bunch, dude.

 

[rhn]

When I disabled that setting, the effect was pretty immediate. Instantly a huge portion of the lag disappeared. I noticed in my debug screen that GameRenderer is now a significantly larger portion, and I'm guessing that's at least partly because of all the fences. But, I definitely do not need fencing, and am currently Thauming it up for my wand. Thanks a bunch, dude.

Don't worry about the fences. Yes they take more effort to render than normal blocks, but it is nearly indistinguishable difference on the overall balance sheet.

I have my worlds(see some of them here: http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/thr...s-a-build-journal-guide-collection-etc.42664/) filled with microblocks and Carpenter's blocks, and yet it is almost fully the machines I have that causes my performance loss. Microblocks and carpenters do have a slight more information that needs to be loaded once the chunk needs to be loaded, but after that it doesn't need to be recalculated again unless you modify the nearby surroundings and cause blockupdates. And the proper "Rendering" rendering is peanuts as it is super low polygon with low res textures(that are all the same). Machines on the other hand have constant updates that requires constant evaluations and re-renderings etc.