[Info Needed]Frame rate at crafting stations is ridiculously low

02/01/2017 16:55
Title: Frame rate at crafting stations is ridiculously low
Reproduction Rate:100%
Blocker?Just annoying as h*** and ridiculous
Details: Frame rate at crafting stations has been jerky and low for the last two patches. I just salvaged a bunch of stuff at the /loc, and /debug showed a frame rate of 3. After leaving the crafting session - 15+. The crafting dialog is jerky and hard to manipulate, drags are laggy in the extreme. There's got to be a bug somewhere, since the crafting setup is a fixed camera with a repetitive animation.
Steps to Reproduce:Turn on /debug and try crafting.
User Specs:
OS: Mac OS X 10.11.6
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-5675R CPU @ 3.10GHz (4) System RAM: 16384
GPU: Intel(R) Iris(TM) Pro Graphics 6200 GPU RAM: 1536
SotA.EarlyAccess.OSX.64.549.Date.01.31.17
Area: Novia_R5_City_Spite
Area Display Name: Spite
Loc: (137.2, 39.5, 31.0)

 

This has NOT improved on Patch 550. Still showing 3fps and crashed out of game with PEACHPIT error. Also showing error, 16 warnings, and 26 info message on /debug. Something is broken.

@Chris

 

Further experimentation:

This is repeatable. If I use the butchering stations here:
Area: Rift's End (POT_island_metropolis_01_template/Rift's End) Loc: (173.1, 90.0, -57.6)
A frame rate that is in the 14-16fps range drops immediately to the 5-6 fps range when starting crafting.
The fps continues to deteriorate while doing batch crafting. After a batch of 20 it was down to 3 fps.
Closing the crafting window and restarting at the table resets the fps to the 5-6 original rate, and again it deteriorates as more crafting is done.
(I assume that if I persevered and ran more crafting batches that I would eventually get the PEACHPIT error that resulted above).

Something is flaky. It doesn't seem to be memory, at least not overall RAM, as the footprint of the app did not change appreciable, in fact it dropped a bit during one run. CPU load running in the 95 - 105% range the whole time. I don't know if there's a way to monitor GPU usage on OS X...

ETA: Whatever is going on, it is DEPENDENT ON THE CRAFTING STATION used. I have this problem moderate to severely with butchering and cooking stations. Not seeing it at all at smelting or carpentry tables (fps less than normal, but not choking further during usage). Will test some more table types when I have the appropriate materials on hand. What's different among these? Animations??

 

...and failed again, with PEACHPIT, after only 4 crafting operations. Crafting is becoming unusable for those stations afflicted. Anyone paying any attention to these? @Attenwood @DarkStarr

 

Thanks for the steps to reproduce, issues like these are hard to track down and resolve without the dev team being able to reproduce and specific steps to replicate the issue. I'll test this today and see if I get the same results. The devs are paying attention and concerned about issues like this.

 

We are, unfortunately, not experiencing this internally. Upon review of your system hardware, we are concerned that these may be expected performance issues for a laptop using an integrated graphics card that is only marginally better than our minimum specs (geared toward dedicated GPUs).

We will continue to work toward overarching performance improvements, but may not be able to specifically target the performance challenges you are experiencing specifically.

 

@Attenwood

Hello! I am not running a laptop, it's a late model iMac with 16gb. It can run the scene in which I am experiencing the issues at 16fps in auto mode. I can't think of any reason why it should slow down to 3fps and then PEACHPIT out when crafting other than a software issue. If SotA can't run on this system, you aren't really supporting OS X.

Also, the crafting stations where I am experiencing the problem worked just fine earlier in R38, it's only been in the last few patches that things bogged down.

 

@Attenwood @Balec Fares deCani

After more experimentation, I think I know what it is.

TLR version: OS X SotA has a hell of a memory leak (or is internally caching in a way that thrashes OS X). This is just the thing that I do most commonly that is affected first, I'm guessing because the crafting animation appears to have a lot of layers going on, and the specific stations animate the largest area.

The evidence: When I was getting the issues before, I was seeing SotA at about 10.3 GB footprint. To make sure I was starting clean, I restarted my router, rebooted the system and then went into SotA (with the same other processes launched as before). I started in Owl's Head, exited and went through the Vale and Novia, entered Rift's End and went to the same crafting station as before. Result 8fps, looks about the same as 'normal'. SotA footprint: 8.35GB. I then cold-started SotA in scene (no reboot) and went to the same crafting station yet again. Normal frame rate. SotA footprint: 6.35GB.

It looks to me like SotA is leaking badly - or is handling internal caching in a way that interacts negatively with OS X. At some point the system starts paging things out to external storage (though I was seeing low memory pressure on the process monitor). This system has a hybrid drive - SSD cache in front of a HD. If for some reason the paging starts using the HD rather than the cache, it's going to go straight to hell.

Now the really weird thing is that when I had the problem this morning, I had also cold-started SotA (though not rebooted), jumping directly into Rift's End, and I saw the 10.35GB footprint. That is very odd, a 4GB difference cold starting directly into the same scene, depending on whether the system had been rebooted or not. Only two things I can think of: 1) Somehow or other SotA has a persistent memory footprint between launches, which I don't think is even feasible (I could be wrong), or 2) some memory management process in the OS had died and wasn't cleaning things up. Even if the latter was the case, SotA still has a leak.

ETA: One final thought/question: How big a difference in footprint (and message traffic) would there be if I was scene master in one case, and not in the other? If it's large, that could put a different spin on things. It looks like /whoismaster is gone. Is there any way to tell from the logs?

 

I can confirm a 30% drop in framerate at the Butcher and Cooking stations at this location, which is not the case with each of the other stations. I just entered the stations and didn't do any crafting. My base framerate is 45fps, and drops to about 30 at the Butcher and Cooking while remaining easily over 40 at the rest. A consistent 30% drop at 2 types of stations seems to warrant investigation. Will test a different location and update later to see if it is isolated to this spot.

OS: Windows 10 (10.0.0) 64bit
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz (8) System RAM: 32706
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti GPU RAM: 3038
SotA.EarlyAccess.Win.64.553.Date.02.03.17
Area: POT_island_metropolis_01_template/Rift's End
Area Display Name: Rift's End
Loc: (165.6, 90.0, -41.7)