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Performance Drop Over Time

Discussion in 'Bug Reports & Installation Support' started by Bloodwolf, Nov 6, 2016.

  1. Bloodwolf

    Bloodwolf Member

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    I just got done playing for the first time after increasing my RAM from 4G to 8G. With 4G the performance sucked from the get go, but was normal play at first with 8G.

    Just so that you know I run two windows on 2 screens, 1 as Judge and 1 as the players, because we all play at the same table and have no Internet.

    I had 8 lights running. And I admit that many of my "walls" were actually Edges and so that effected things but it still doesn't explain what happened.

    Over the course of a 3 hour session the performance of the program started dropping. By the end of the 3 hours we had to call the session because the program basically froze. Turn around between the two windows had increased from a second to over a minute per. I attempted to shut down the program and restart but it had a worse effect. The player window stopped responding all together. When it finally zoomed out it still would not move it interact with anything else. So then I tried restarting the laptop, but this had no effect either. So I did a full shut down and then restart, but once again no effect. After that I changed all of my Edges to Walls and tried to restart the program. Again no effect.

    So we shut for the night.

    Is there a cache that is filling up?

    As for performance with the 4G RAM the RAM was running at 86%+ with one window running at 1.4G and the other at 0.6G. With the 8G both windows run at 1.4-1.6G and at 56-60%. The CPU at first was running at a low percentage but in the end each window varies from 0-30% and seemed to hold there far longer.

    Any ideas what I have been running into?
     
  2. Whirlingdervish

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    is this the same laptop you mentioned in a differnt thread that you described as old?
     
  3. Bloodwolf

    Bloodwolf Member

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    Yes. Last week I managed to find a bigger RAM for it and I had hoped that the problem was my 4G RAM. It did help a ton for the first 2 hours or so but then things began slowing down and it got progressively worse over the course of another hour.

    It is a 6 or 7 year old HP Pavilion running Windows 10.
     
  4. Mickey

    Mickey Member

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    I have a 2 PC (desktop) setup for my local game. One for me as GM and one for my players hooked up to a large monitor in the table. My PC is an i7 4790k @4.0GHz, 16GB RAM, GTX980 graphics card. The player's PC is an i7 2600k @3.4GHz, 8GB RAM, GTX780 graphics. Both running Windows 10 64bit.

    Pretty much the same thing happens on both computers. At the start, everything runs smoothly but, as the game goes on, things start to get bogged down and it slowly gets to the point where it is impossible to scroll around the map on either computer. In our game there are 4 Player characters with their own light sources and I'll usually have about 4-6 light sources from NPCs, torches, candles, etc.

    I'm wondering if it's some sort of memory leak, perhaps?
     
  5. Bloodwolf

    Bloodwolf Member

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    We'll both of your computer out class mine so maybe it is a memory cache problem with Java and not just my old junk.
     
  6. owlbear

    owlbear Administrator
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    Ugh. memory leaks are annoying as all get out. Will start searching for this and let you all know what I find. I don't *want* to find a memory leak mind you, but I also don't want a system that fails over time.

    Why can't we just have nice things that manage their own memory like good little programs.
     
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  7. Bloodwolf

    Bloodwolf Member

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    As we try to track down the problem is there anyway to reset things so that we don't have to call a session after 3 hours?
     
  8. owlbear

    owlbear Administrator
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    The options to "clean" up stuff in D20PRO are to either
    1. switch maps! switching maps has the advantage that your lights are elsewhere. In the few cases I've been able to replicate the kind of situation you're talking about, it's not the players who are lagged -- so switch your map to an empty one with no FOW/Lights. then switch back.
    2. Force the garbage collection to run from the Options panel

      upload_2016-11-9_15-6-37.png

    3. make sure "Hide Fog of War" is toggled on -- checked. This hides the Alpha blended colors for FoW and saves on a lot of memory and processing power. This will only affect regions, but for most cases this will speed things up tremendously!
    4. additionally, make sure you're NOT using the Hide Negative Space option. This can be a major slow down depending on your map design and layout.

      upload_2016-11-9_15-9-27.png

     
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  9. Bloodwolf

    Bloodwolf Member

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    I'll check out and see if I have any running wrong and then see how it works out. But out next game weekend won't be until next weekend.
     
  10. Bloodwolf

    Bloodwolf Member

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    Ok Hide Fog of War was off so fixed that. Hide Negative Space was already off so good there. And did the Attempt GC.

    As a side note you might want to think about a scroll bar for the General tab in the Options because at first I thought I was missing something until I pulled the edges of the pop up window down and up to expand the view.
     
  11. Bloodwolf

    Bloodwolf Member

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    Oh and I also did a resource refresh since the map itself was build on 3.9 beta and not 3.11. I was thinking that since it was built in the beta that maybe there was a resource link causing the problem.
     
  12. Wesley Gorby

    Wesley Gorby Production/Community Manager
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    T might have another opinion and chime in, but just as a long time person who has had experience with Betas of most flavors (not just D20PRO).. You really really should not be using Betas to build assets for existing games.

    Far too often it just leads to problems and issues. beta are great in helping identify bugs, offer suggestions and help guide the team to get the application to do what the community wants or needs.. Betas are horrible for actually using as a building platform...

    just my 2 coppers of course...
     
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  13. Bloodwolf

    Bloodwolf Member

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    Owlbear I tried all of these but having no luck. Now the program starts out slow and I can just imagine what it will be like in a couple hours. I even went so far as to uninstall and reinstall D20Pro to see if that would have any effect. Another thing that I noticed is that when I go to open the map it even loads slowly.

    Any log to send you so that you can see if you can find the problem?
     
  14. Bloodwolf

    Bloodwolf Member

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    On another map with FOW things seem to be fine so it has to be that map.
     
  15. Bloodwolf

    Bloodwolf Member

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    I just deleted all the lights and things sped up to normal. So it had to be one of the lights. I copied several of the lights for different players and it seemed that as I deleted the lights that were copied it seemed to speed up the deleting process. Could there be a memory leak or loop problem with duplicated lights?
     
  16. KainPen

    KainPen Member

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    checking hide the fog of war did help my game out I was able to run with 3 lights sources +1 one remote players light source, Before it was slow to a crawl with 2, +1 one from my remote player. I would often only have 2 running to make the game work.

    I am going to give this a try to, I am experience the same lag, and only thing that seems to fix it is when I reduce the number of lights running at a time. But i duplicated a lot of my light sources so maybe this is it.
     
  17. Bloodwolf

    Bloodwolf Member

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    Hide fog of war is on. Every time I go to a new map I have to hide fog of war again.

    And I also found that if I add a light to a specific player it slowed down. I run 4 on different characters and it runs fine and never slows down. I run 4 lights with one of them on that specific player and it slows to a crawl. Just something I noticed last night during our game.
     
  18. Tay-Dor

    Tay-Dor Active Member

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    I have 6 remote players with 6 private light sources (one 240 darkvision, 5 x 60ft darkvision). Occasionally a familiar has its 240 darkvision turned on when his owner is looking through the familiars eyes. All lights are duplicates as I didn't want to have to edit every light source individually. When .11 first came out, it worked great with only minimal expected lag. Lately it seems to get a little more sluggish, although not near as bad as before .11

    I did notice last session when I modified all the 60ft lights into 240 ft lights (PCs were outside and I still wanted light interaction with tree trunks and some ruins in the woods encounter) and the slow down got a little worse. I ended up turning off all the lights and not using shadowcasting at all for that map just to get through the encounter.

    I'll keep playing around with it. My players enjoy shadowcasting.
     
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