Allocating more RAM to PA?

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Gondlar
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Re: Allocating more RAM to PA?

Postby Gondlar » Sun Sep 22, 2013 9:33 pm

You can tell it uses only x GB of RAM or or 3 threads, but you can not tell that that is the reason for the lag. E.g. if there's an inefficient algorithm at work, more threads won't help much.
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MAdMaN
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Re: Allocating more RAM to PA?

Postby MAdMaN » Sun Sep 22, 2013 11:26 pm

Gondlar wrote:You can tell it uses only x GB of RAM or or 3 threads, but you can not tell that that is the reason for the lag. E.g. if there's an inefficient algorithm at work, more threads won't help much.

As I said earlier,
MAdMaN wrote:You don't need to see the code to know what's causing the game to lag. You can do something and it'll lag, so you try doing that thing again (in the same game or a new one) and see if it lags again. It's how games testers, many of whom aren't coders, work.

With repeated testing you can pretty accurately narrow down the problem, especially when you have numerous people willing to try replicating the results, as there are on this forum. By doing this we've discovered a number of issues which are known to cause lag.
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Re: Allocating more RAM to PA?

Postby Gondlar » Mon Sep 23, 2013 1:55 pm

I'm getting the impression we have a misunderstanding here, so let me start from the beginning:

There is quite a big difference between saying "Through thorough testing I noticed that every time I do X it leads to issue Y, so I conclude there might be a problem Z with it." and saying "I heard that problem Z is can cause issue Y, therefore I conclude that this is your problem!" What I intended to say was that the 2nd statement lacks any "scientific" base, so unless the person has some insight (e.g. to the code) the rest of us does not have, he probably should rethink their conclusion or provide some evidence before posing it.

I hope this makes things clearer, because I do agree with every singe one of your posts up to now, it just wasn't my point here.
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Re: Allocating more RAM to PA?

Postby dc4bs » Tue Sep 24, 2013 12:05 am

From my own observations and what I've read in other various threads:

1: Smaller prisons tend to have less or even no lag issues.

2: I notice that when my prison uses 512 Mb or less ram that it tends to run without lag. As the game is played, I have observed ram use increase but never decrease. I have seen upwards of 850-900 Mb in use (Win7 Pro 64bit - 8 Gb ram). As ram use increases, lag increases (The specific correlation is ?). After saving, completely exiting the game and reloading, my prison will be back under 512 Mb ram used till the next "busy" cycle when it increases and lag begins again. "Busy" usually means a work period or perhaps mealtime when large numbers of prisoners are doing some tasks or all path finding at once... Once lag starts, it normally does not go away without a full game restart though sometimes it will reduce during sleep time.

3: Other threads on this forum note that removing some or even all sound files can reduce lag significantly (or even eliminate it). Just search the forum for details on this one. I haven't tried it myself but it does make sense to me based on my experience with other games.
NOTE: I know some Bethesda games such as "Oblivion" had similar issues. A mod called "quiet feet" that simply replaced all footfall sounds in the game with "empty" placeholder audio clips would seriously reduce lag for many players with weaker audio cards. The issue being that when the audio card is overloaded with so many simultaneous sounds, the game pauses briefly for the audio to "catch up" before continuing on. Can cause "stuttering" audio and video (game lag) when this happens up to a couple times per second...

As for multithreading, I see all 4 cores being used when PA is running. Yes, one core is noticeably busier than the others (presumably the primary thread is running there) but even that one core never gets higher than about 70-75% on my PC. I can't imagine that would lead to lag conditions within the game.

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