ANOTHER how to load KSP faster (1.4.3)

[Dimas152]

yes, i know this question has been asked many times, i have tried the solutions i get around reddit and this forum
but this one's serious problem
MY KSP LOADS IN 4 HOURS
yeah my modlist is pretty high, but in 1.3.1 i have much more mods and it's just 30-50 minutes long

regards

[Not Sure]

26 minutes ago, [INDO]dimas_1502 said:

yes, i know this question has been asked many times, i have tried the solutions i get around reddit and this forum
but this one's serious problem
MY KSP LOADS IN 4 HOURS
yeah my modlist is pretty high, but in 1.3.1 i have much more mods and it's just 30-50 minutes long

regards

Um, 30 minutes you considered normal???

Mine takes 3 min at most.

i did have an issue recently where things were loading crazy slow, and restarting my computer fixed it.

[Geonovast]

Computer specs?

This isn't normal.  Either you've got something severely under powered (Such as insanely low RAM and it's paging a lot), or something is seriously wrong with your computer.

[Corona688]

...or it might be trying to access the internet through the proxy you've configured in Internet Explorer and timing out after many minutes of waiting. Several times in succession.  Go into internet options and make sure proxy isn't enabled there.

[Dimas152]

51 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

Computer specs?

This isn't normal.  Either you've got something severely under powered (Such as insanely low RAM and it's paging a lot), or something is seriously wrong with your computer.

1.80 GHz AMD A6 APU with Radeon R4
6 GB RAM
not so potato
 

...or it might be trying to access the internet through the proxy you've configured in Internet Explorer and timing out after many minutes of waiting. Several times in succession.  Go into internet options and make sure proxy isn't enabled there.

never used that
btw it gone slow after the loading bar is on the halfway to the end

Edited May 14, 2018 by [INDO]dimas_1502

[Corona688]

3 minutes ago, [INDO]dimas_1502 said:

never used that

Which is why so many people never think to check it, but the settings still exist somewhere, and are honored by surprisingly many external programs.  KSP is one of them.

 

[Dimas152]

24 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

5 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

Which is why so many people never think to check it, but the settings still exist somewhere, and are honored by surprisingly many external programs.  KSP is one of them.

 

lemme check then (ignore these overlapping reply)

EDIT: seems like the proxy isn't enabled

Edited May 14, 2018 by [INDO]dimas_1502

[CrashyMcCrashFace]

I strongly suspect this is a time-out and not a loading time. You're computer/application is just sitting and waiting for something. Something that will never happen and then after some set timeout period it gives up and continues. Scientific method -> remove all your mods, load the game. If no problem then start adding 1 mod at a time until you hit the problem.

[Dimas152]

uninstalled AVC and CraftCategorizer
ksp loads 1 hour faster
still long but gives big effect

[DrLicor]

I got 44000 MM-patches, KSP installed on a SSD, when it doesnt load the patches from the cache, its about 10min to load and with loading the patches from cache, it will load in within the 5 minutes... Thats on a new build. My old laptop did it in twice the time, max. 
+ how big is your KSP, when it needs to load more files than it has avaiable in RAM, it will use the HDD or SSD for storing, which are way, way slower... So that effect will kick in when you have too many mods.

How long does it take to load a stock vanilla KSP?

Edited May 15, 2018 by DrLicor

[Not Sure]

23 hours ago, [INDO]dimas_1502 said:

1.80 GHz AMD A6 APU with Radeon R4

Mac? I’m on Mac. It really confused me for a couple hours, was unbearable, tried everything, but a computer restart fixed it

[Lisias]

Just now, Not Sure said:

Mac? I’m on Mac. It really confused me for a couple hours, was unbearable, tried everything, but a computer restart fixed it

Restarting the computer to fix things was plain unthinkable on Mavericks time and before.

Apple had gone through the tubes. Epically. Would Bill Gates be Apple's CEO, and the transition to the Microsoft Way would be complete.

[Not Sure]

3 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Restarting the computer to fix things was plain unthinkable on Mavericks time and before.

Apple had gone through the tubes. Epically. Would Bill Gates be Apple's CEO, and the transition to the Microsoft Way would be complete.

Typically after a restart I encounter MORE problems, and this was a last resort.

[Dimas152]

On 5/15/2018 at 9:38 PM, Not Sure said:

Mac? I’m on Mac. It really confused me for a couple hours, was unbearable, tried everything, but a computer restart fixed it

nope, windows 8.1
 

[Harry Rhodan]

On 5/14/2018 at 5:27 PM, [INDO]dimas_1502 said:

1.80 GHz AMD A6 APU with Radeon R4
6 GB RAM
not so potato

Pretty much potato. And considering that I've seen people with more than 16GB of their RAM filled with mods your 6GB might already be not enough and will force your system into a vicous cycle of unloading already loaded mods into the page file while still having to load even more mods into the RAM.

[Dimas152]

33 minutes ago, Harry Rhodan said:

Pretty much potato. And considering that I've seen people with more than 16GB of their RAM filled with mods your 6GB might already be not enough and will force your system into a vicous cycle of unloading already loaded mods into the page file while still having to load even more mods into the RAM.

nah, in 1.3.1 i have much more mods and it loads ok

[Harry Rhodan]

13 minutes ago, [INDO]dimas_1502 said:

nah, in 1.3.1 i have much more mods and it loads ok

That depends on the mods. And do you have the DLC? That also adds more parts and textures that will already push the stock game over the 4GB limit.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, [INDO]dimas_1502 said:

nah, in 1.3.1 i have much more mods and it loads ok

1.4.3 is a bit more memory hungry. I don't know exactly what was changed, but I have the feeling that they trimmed somehow the Garbage Collector to be less intrusive (by being less active). This, and the nasty habit from Unity of never giving memory back to the system, can be a hindrance to gameplay on smaller memory systems.

[Not Sure]

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

1.4.3 is a bit more memory hungry. I don't know exactly what was changed, but I have the feeling that they trimmed somehow the Garbage Collector to be less intrusive (by being less active). This, and the nasty habit from Unity of never giving memory back to the system, can be a hindrance to gameplay on smaller memory systems.

I noticed that garbage collection was lessened. Sadly.

[Lisias]

9 minutes ago, Not Sure said:

I noticed that garbage collection was lessened. Sadly.

Assuming we are right, I don't think they had any other choice. Unity is terrible on memory management.

Mono's own GC is not exactly state of the art neither - it makes me miss the old Mark & Sweep times.

[Corona688]

4 hours ago, Lisias said:

This, and the nasty habit from Unity of never giving memory back to the system, can be a hindrance to gameplay on smaller memory systems.

Nearly every program acts like this.  KSP just uses so much we actually notice, and runs for hours at a time.

[Lisias]

24 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

Nearly every program acts like this.  KSP just uses so much we actually notice, and runs for hours at a time.

Not all of them - just the bad behaviouring ones.

I monitor my servers, and I profile the programs I write. Memory is given back to the system when not needed - so other programs can use it without swapping.

People that justify not giving memory back to the system due the "high cost of operation" simply ignores that swapping memory is even more expensive, and every system will swap once the available memory is low.

If I leave KSP working by night without doing anything, at the morning it had crashed by lack of memory.

So... Nope. Just a few poorly memory managed programs does that, as just a few of the programs I run on my machine crashes by lack of memory even by doing nothing.

Edited May 17, 2018 by Lisias
better phrasing

[Lisias]

I just talked to my son. He's playing Elite Dangerous.

On the weekend, he spends the whole night playing Elite while browsing the Internet and talking with his friends on forums - sometimes planning group missions - not to mention watching tutorials on Youtube.

He said to me that he never had to restart Elite. It never crashed, it never had run out or memory.

His machine has 8G of RAM. Mine has 16G, KSP is constantly stuttering, and I have to restart KSP once each 4 hours max as it eats all the system memory and I end up with an unusable system if I don't shut it down.

Edited May 17, 2018 by Lisias
beter phrasing

[Corona688]

28 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Not all of them - just the bad behaving ones.

It's an underlying principle of computer software architecture.  Once your heap segment grows, it's not getting smaller.*

The operating system makes its own judgements about what memory pages you're really using and assigns / swaps accordingly, of course.

Quote

I monitor my servers, and I profile the programs I write. Memory is given back to the system when not needed - so other programs can use it without swapping.

Unless you're doing funky things with mmap(), or letting your process quit entirely, you're not giving memory to the system, just returning it to the heap.*  That stops the heap from growing, but doesn't make it smaller.

Quote

If I leave KSP working by night without doing anything, at the morning it had crashed by lack of memory.

Did I say somewhere that KSP wasn't an incredible and inexplicable memory pig?  It is an incredible and inexplicable memory pig.

I think that on top of whatever might be leaking, KSP suffers terrible memory fragmentation.  That's why garbage cleanup gets more laggy and intrusive the longer KSP runs.

* There's exceptions to the rule, of course, especially when allocating/freeing extremely large blocks of memory in one go.

Edited May 17, 2018 by Corona688

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, Corona688 said:

Unless you're doing funky things with mmap(), or letting your process quit entirely, you're not giving memory to the system, just returning it to the heap.*  That stops the heap from growing, but doesn't make it smaller.

I don't know what the memory management does, and I don't care. What I know is that memory is given back to the system - both the profiling and the monitoring tools proves that. The process' memory grows and shrinks over the time.

Heck. Even my Java programs does that. Heck², even my Python programs does that.

1 hour ago, Corona688 said:

Did I say somewhere that KSP wasn't an incredible and inexplicable memory pig?  It is an incredible and inexplicable memory pig.

It's not inexplicable. A simple look on GCMonitor and you know where the memory is.

A huge hunk of memory is used to load the textures. Another good one on the assemblies itself. The remaining goes to the heap. None of them is ever released. Textures and assemblies, for obvious reasons.

The heap, on the other hand, can shrink without prejudice to the overall performance - as I said, of course requesting/returning memory from/to the system is expensive. But swapping is some orders of magnitude worse, so...

On top of that, Unity simply does not know when to stop. And since it never returns memory neither, you have the offense added to the injury.

1 hour ago, Corona688 said:

I think that on top of whatever might be leaking, KSP suffers terrible memory fragmentation.  That's why garbage cleanup gets more laggy and intrusive the longer KSP runs.

It's not a problem for "modern" garbage collectors from almost 10 years now. Java, since de JDK7, with the G1GC can get a stable framerate with somewhat deterministic GC cycles. (java release history).

And once you have some way to control and predict the GC behaviour, you can choose the times when a full defragmentation can happens without too much FPS impairing. Switching to Map, Tracking Station or any other KSC "building" are an excellent window of opportunity for a more laborious and comprehensive memory defragmentation.

Not to mention that, well, there're heap use approaches that minimizes fragmentation itself - at expense of some memory waste, but hell - it's still better than what we get now.

By any angle I look, Mono's GC is not yet top notch and Unity's approach to the problem is worse than the problem. And yes, KSP is the "victim" here.

Edited May 17, 2018 by Lisias
better phrasing