Incredibly poor performance - regular freezes

[pbtrn10k]

Hi

I installed the latest nightly version of Simutrans today and I am experiencing incredibly frequent freezing (at least once per minute) which is really quite annoying. Am I the only one?

I am using the latest version of Ubuntu, completely up to date, on a machine with 6Gb RAM and a 2.33GHz Intel Quad Core processor

Can anyone tell me what information is needed to diagnose these problems, or if there is any way to improve this performance?

Thanks

Pete

[jamespetts]

If you have a 64-bit operating system, are you using the 64-bit version of Simutrans?

[pbtrn10k]

To be perfectly honest I don't know if my processor is 64 bit, so as far as I'm aware I'm using the 32 bit Ubuntu - how can I tell which version I am using?

[jamespetts]

If you have 6Gb of RAM, you'll need a 64-bit processor, otherwise 2Gb of it will be unusable. Indeed, I think that with your 32-bit operating system, 2 of your 6Gb of RAM is useless, although I am not entirely sure about that.

[wipi35]

Starting  Simutrans with -nomidi may help.

[pbtrn10k]

Using -nomidi seems to help a lot - thanks

[mascarpone]

I experienced this too, with the latest ubuntu on a 32 bit OS.

When launched from terminal, you could read some funny error messages, like "font not found" or "World destroyed"

[Dwachs]

When launched from terminal, you could read some funny error messages, like "font not found" or "World destroyed"

these are no 'real' error messages, nothing critical.

[Amelek]

this could be caused by old implementation of choose signals and trains stopping at signal before not their station

[dannystaple]

I was also experiencing this, and tried the 102.0 nightly instead of the 101 (which is default in Ubuntu right now). Still saw the issue. -nomidi helped a lot.

I also found an "undead" process - the day before I had accidentally killed a running game by right clicking on the taskbar. It turned out that although the display was gone, it was still there, and still pulling CPU the whole time. I had to kill it then. Ideally - a "do you really want to close without saving X hours of gameplay" would have been nice.

One note possibly worth mentioning - I am playing using pak128.

[Maju]

Hello. I registered in order to be able to reply here. I looked at the forums because I am suffering this problem since I installed the 102.2.2 version, which is downloadable via Ubuntu Software Center (I have updated Lucid Lynx as OS on an AMD Athlon 64).

Since then (and not with the previous version, which I believe was v. 100 - on Jaunty) my games freeze once and again except when in pause. They normally take very long (one minute or more) to recover and I have found a way around but it's not too practical and certainly not a solution.

What I do is to have the system monitor open and each time the game freezes, I go there to (1) stop the process and (2) continue the process. That way I save myself many frustrating minutes of wait.

When I arrive there it's often in futex queue, what seems to mean that it's stopped at some semaphor. But often I still catch it at the previous process, which is something like "snd_seq_syn_oss_writec_sync" (too quick to be sure of the exact text), whatever that means.

Now and then, if I don't intervene, it recovers relatively fast but mostly it takes very long. As it does not happen with other programs (I only once caught my browser in such kind of freeze) I understand it's a problem of Simutrans 102.2.2 in its interaction with Ubuntu.

Please someone fix it.

...

Edit: it happens both with Pak64 and with Pak128 Britain.

Also Simutrans does not seem to use too much CPU but it does quite a bit of RAM, at least with Pak128 Britain, where it takes like 60 MiB (being one of the most memory demanding programs) - Pak64 only seems to take like 25 or so. However that should not be a problem when the System Monitor reports a total of 874.8 MiB and 2/3 of the RAM is available.

Simu freezes no matter what at regular intervals as reported above (except if paused, which I use when I can recall for adding new infrastructures).



I've been trying the -nomidi workaround for an hour or more now and it works swiftly even with Pak 286 Britain. Thanks.

{ merged double post -Isaac }

[prissi]

This is an error of SDL_mixer, I suppose, since simutrans do not call any low level stuff.