Can someone help me figure out my weird frame rate issue? (1 Viewer)

[cameron1612]

Hello friends,

I've noticed that when I run the loader, I seem to get abnormal drops in frame rate. It begins running at a very high frame rate, even at full screen, but after a few seconds it seems to drop to sometimes even below 5 fps. Suddenly, it will pick back up again and be perfectly smooth for a few seconds, before dropping severely again. I've watched my CPU performance while this happens, and it never goes over 20%, so I don't really know what's going on here. I should mention I have a pretty decent CPU, too; from what I've read on here most people with a similar or even worse performing CPU run this just fine. I should also mention I only get this issue with the loader, vanilla SDT seems to run smoother much more consistently. Any ideas how I can fix this issue or what's causing it? Thanks for any help!

 

[TheLowKing]

Try disabling strand shaders.

 

[stuntcock]

I've watched my CPU performance while this happens, and it never goes over 20%, so I don't really know what's going on here.

Flash doesn't do much multi-threading unless the application is specifically written to take advantage of it (which SDT isn't). So it overwhelms one CPU core but can't share load onto the remaining cores, and you get lousy FPS despite the CPU availability.

I should also mention I only get this issue with the loader, vanilla SDT seems to run smoother much more consistently. Any ideas how I can fix this issue or what's causing it?

Maybe a poorly-optimized mod which is busy-waiting? Maybe a mod which is activating itself periodically (e.g. to check for orphaned strands) and then throwing a flurry of exceptions due to bad code? Maybe you're running two different versions of the same mod and they're interfering with each other (e.g. repeatedly adding an element to the scene and then removing it) which leads to heavy garbage-collection activity every few seconds? We'd need more information in order to diagnose the problem.

• which Flash player version are you running?
  • Does the problem persist if you upgrade to the latest version?
• which Loader version are you running?
  • Does the problem persist if you upgrade to the latest version?
• which mods are you running?
  • You can probably just post the contents of your Mods.txt files, but if you're manually loading any mods after startup then mention them also.
  • Are there any duplicate entries, or multiple entries for different versions of the same mod?
    • Mod makers can include mutex logic so that duplicate entries would be harmless. But this isn't always done, so it doesn't hurt to double-check (just in case you made a copy-paste, for example).
  • Does the problem persist if you comment out all of the entries in Mods.txt?
    • Can you selectively re-enable mods one-by-one to figure out which one is triggering the problem?

 

[cameron1612]

I re-downloaded the loader pack I originally got, and it's running much better now. I guess I tinkered with some setting which was slowing me down (I wonder what...), as I only had the default mods loaded on startup and even without manually loading mods it was lagging before. Now with the same default mods on startup it's running much better. That's nice to know, that it uses one core at a time that explains why it lags at times actually. Thanks for all the help guys.