KSP on an SSD (loading times)

[PTNLemay]

I use a Crucial M4 SSD (128GB) as my boot drive and I installed both Steam and KSP onto it for (what I hoped would be) quick load times. I've noticed that some games just don't want to load quickly, while others load amazingly fast. Unfortunately it looks like KSP is in the former. I'm not sure if it's something I'm doing wrong, but starting up KSP always takes a good 60 - 70 seconds. Longer if I have a lot of part-packs installed. Even just switching from the Game Start menu to the space center can take a good 8 - 10 seconds sometimes. Is this normal, or should I be worried? I know Unity has some limitations, but I wonder what could make an SSD's response times slow down like that.

The rest of my PC's specs are pretty decent, but not fantastic.

Windows 7

PNY GTX 670 (no overclock)

i5-3570K (no overclock)

4 x 4GB Crucial RAM

I'm running the latest KSP 0.21 version.

Just as an opposite example, Skyrim always loads ridiculously fast, to the point that I can never read those little folklore tips and hints that they show during the load screen. Age of Empires Online was also quite fast (buggy as hell game, but it loaded fast). Starcraft 2 on the other hand is much slower to load, though not as bad as KSP.

Edited September 9, 2013 by PTNLemay

[Clamps]

Same, tried two different SSDs and it's slow on both. Loading KSP onto a Ramdisk definitely made an improvement though.

[Aphox]

Far as I've heard, SSD's and RAMDisks for KSP make very little difference in most cases. It can be a touchy subject as some people will defend the performance increase. I suppose it depends on the hardware and the person observing the changes.

But, for the record, everyone I talk to that has loaded KSP onto such a device experiences the same load times as when they had it on a mechanical HDD. It's a limitation of the game, not the hardware.

tl;dr no you shouldn't be worried

[doggie015]

I use a platter based HDD and even I don't get loading times that slow! I think you should run a virus scan ASAP

[PTNLemay]

Loading KSP onto a Ramdisk definitely made an improvement though.

Just KSP, or did you have to install Steam onto the Ramdisk as well? Because my whole KSP thingy is only 1.42 GBs I think... I mean it can't be that difficult to set-up a Ramdisk that small, can it?

I use a platter based HDD and even I don't get loading times that slow! I think you should run a virus scan ASAP

I run a clean PC, I doubt it's a virus. But it might be something that's bugged or unoptimized. If I have to I'll reinstall the game, but first I want to hear more input from different people.

[FITorion]

All stock game: 40 seconds from click to menu screen. on Samsung 830 (256GB advertised but really 238GB)

[lammatt]

SSD still isnt a good deal now...

why not 4X 1TB SATA3 7200rpm 64Mb cache on RAID 0 when it's still cheaper than a 1TB SSD which is barely 500MB/s

i'm fairly sure 4X RAID0 is faster than 500MB/S sequential read (because i am on RAID0 with 2X SATA2 32Mb cache 7200 and i'm having >300MB/s sequential read)

[Tiron]

I saw a thing in a thread here a few weeks back where someone had done an analysis of the loading and determined that one thing took longer than anything else: Textures.

Textures are also the number one Memory Hog, so far as I'm aware, and I'm guessing the two are related.

It seems to me that it's not that KSP is slowing down your SSD, it's simply that it's taking awhile to process the textures (and using a ton of memory doing it.) Your SSD Helps get the textures into the system faster, but frankly...even Mapsat's huge maps are only 2mb compressed. It's not getting them off the hard drive that's the problem.

Now if we could use DDS textures and not HAVE to send them through processing to load them...it'd probably make for huge load-time AND memory usage gains all around. If it was done right, anyway.

[SkyHook]

Yes the loading times are due to a bug that was introduced with 0.21 and will not be fixable until the devs patch it. I have KSP installed onto my SSD, and the only reason why I have kept it there is because it is only about 2 GB with a TON of mods. Otherwise I would have removed it, as SSDs do not seem to improve loading times for anything, really. Cheers!

[krenshala]

SSD still isnt a good deal now...

why not 4X 1TB SATA3 7200rpm 64Mb cache on RAID 0 when it's still cheaper than a 1TB SSD which is barely 500MB/s

i'm fairly sure 4X RAID0 is faster than 500MB/S sequential read (because i am on RAID0 with 2X SATA2 32Mb cache 7200 and i'm having >300MB/s sequential read)

Using RAID and/or newer generation SATA devices might help, but only if the load times are due to disk reads being the bottle-neck. The simplest way to test whether the drive read times are the problem is to time game startup run from the HDD and again from a RAM drive. If the drive is the bottle-neck the RAM drive should load significantly faster since it has a much wider bus to the processor. If, as other have pointed out, the problem is with KSP/Unity processing the data it is reading in, however, then you will see little to no improvement when loading from a RAM drive compared to a SATA device.

While I've only started playing about two days before 0.21 came out, for what this game loads the start time isn't unreasonable in my opinion.

[DMagic]

Using a bunch of mechanical HDD's in a RAID isn't likely to make any difference here. You can get really high sequential read and write speeds doing this (this applies generally to moving around really big files), but the real advantage of SSDs is in their high random read and write speeds. These can be as much as 50-100X faster than a mechanical drive and putting 2, 4 or 50 drives in an array won't do anything to help that. Random read speeds are what generally affect loading times, such as windows bootup, game loading, application startup and other things like that. Either way, disk read speed doesn't seem to really be the bottleneck in KSP's initial load time.

[PTNLemay]

Yes the loading times are due to a bug that was introduced with 0.21 and will not be fixable until the devs patch it... Cheers!

Cool beans, thanks for the info.

Not to say I'm content to blame the devs or anything, they do great work and I know they have a lot on their plate. I'm just glad there's a logical explanation and that it's not a hive of bugs hiding in my PC that's causing the problem.

[allmhuran]

I run on a corsair SSD and KSP loads in about 15 seconds for me (I only get to see three or four of the witty loading hints). I have no mods installed.

I would suggest that if people are having loading times significantly longer than this, then perhaps you have a lot of crafts or a lot of save files or both.

Since the game data files are stored as text they need to be processed into the game data structures. Text parsing is an expensive process, and thus the loading time will also depend on your CPU. I have an I7. Large craft and large saves require even more text parsing (save files can get very large indeed).

A good solution from the development side of things would be to write out game data as binary so it can be streamed in on reload without requiring parsing every time (as discussed in a recent thread). From a user point of view, there's not a lot you can do other than...

1) Have a fast CPU

2) Clean up your save files (remove debris, remove unwanted craft, etc)

The "long loading time" bug is not normally mentioned in the context of the initial game load, but rather in the context of transitions. For example, it takes several seconds (sometimes several dozen) to transition from the VAB scene to the space centre scene, and several seconds (likewise) to transition from the space centre scene to the main menu screen. That's a different issue.

Edited September 9, 2013 by allmhuran

[PTNLemay]

Found out something interesting today. All those times I was running KSP and it was taking up to 70 seconds to open. I was running Folding @ Home in the background...

It's a program that takes every spare piece of CPU power and puts it into running complicated DNA and protein simulations for universities all around the world. It's pretty cool, and they claim that it shouldn't interfeer with your every day computer usage (it dials back it's CPU hogging as your other tasks start to demand more). But... clearly it was having an effect. I turned off F@H for the first time in a while and ran KSP, it started in 40 seconds flat.

So... yeah, that was a big help.

Edited September 27, 2013 by PTNLemay

[NoMrBond]

Did something similar (Toshiba THNSNH128GCST) because I was constantly reloading due to making mods and the results are really inconsistent, sometimes it boots (or database reloads) like lightning, and other times, well, it makes me sad since this drive is meant to be a skyrocket.

I asked about it during last weeks KSPTV, and the current slow loading is due to a fix implemented for 0.21, which is due to be fixed (fix fixed) with 0.22 (maybe due to Unity 4.2).

[PolecatEZ]

I run RAID-0 256mb SSD's for KSP and about 1.5 gigs worth of parts mods. My load time is around 1:30. I was running it from a RAMdisk also and noticed no difference when I stopped bothering. After that initial load though, it really doesn't make much difference what you're running off. The speed does come in handy when I'm doing iterative parts reloads, like .cfg combos, and it only takes a few seconds each time to reload every part. For regular gameplay, however, it should do a whole lot of not much.

[TheSola10]

I used to have 10mins straight load times on my Linux station. I then did a bind mount of GameData from my SSD and now the loading takes less than 5 minutes. My side of the problem is probably loading the 60 mods I have installed.

[Snark]

5 hours ago, TheSola10 said:

I used to have 10mins straight load times on my Linux station. I then did a bind mount of GameData from my SSD and now the loading takes less than 5 minutes. My side of the problem is probably loading the 60 mods I have installed.

Just to be clear, this thread is nearly four years old, and KSP has changed significantly since everything you read before your post.

For example, one person mentioned "wouldn't it be nice if we had DDS textures"... which we didn't, in 2013... but we now do.

It may be that SSD load times are still a relevant topic today, but since most of the discussion here is so ancient, it's highly likely to confuse anyone who comes along today and reads this thread, if they don't happen to notice the dates on the post.

Therefore, locking the thread to avoid confusion.  If someone wants to discuss SSD load times, feel free to spin up a new thread.