To track debris or not, any performance hits or benefits?

[Waxing_Kibbous]

I've had about 10 rescues now in my current game, in the past I've always just stopped tracking the "hulks," but lately I've been changing the status to debris instead. My last session I've noticed a bit of slowdown in the framerate, perhaps because of this? What are the pros and cons of either method?

[ToukieToucan]

Whenever I rescue a kerbal I change the craft to debris as well. Though it probably doesn't make a big difference it looks better.  Would you rather see all kinds of debris floating around which don't have any real purpose to be shown which might even be confusing 

 

OR
 

(More) Organized orbit lines.

[FungusForge]

It shouldn't have any negative effects when you change it to debris. Depending on your persistent debris setting it should actually be beneficial for more than just decluttering your tracking station. What a low persistent debris setting will do is automatically scuttle the oldest piece of debris, and I believe this includes manually assigned debris as well.

[Snark]

Debris is pretty cheap to leave in existence.  It's running on rails, there's no physics modeling to be done, it doesn't even have to be displayed in the map view (assuming you've got debris display toggled off).  I never bother worrying about debris, and by late career I have lots of it floating around (as in "well over a hundred"), and I've never noticed any impact on my game performance, and my computer's not some sort of special high-end gaming rig.  Certainly, ten measly debris pieces should have an impact on your game that's undetectably small, even if you're playing on a potato.

The only time I notice the game slowing down as I move to later career and there's a lot more stuff flying around is when I'm running RemoteTech and have a much more complex comms network, since then there's a lot more processing to do for the overall system.  But except when I'm running RT, it really doesn't seem to make much difference.

Edited February 9, 2016 by Snark

[Velve666]

I too change unused and defunct crafts into debris. with or without it toggled in the station I dont see a noticeable decrease in performance. At this point I have 54 debris scattered in LKO.

I am running ksp on a potato so I thought my input might be valuable, "2.26ghz cpu, 4 gig ram".

[Geschosskopf]

On 2/8/2016 at 0:46 PM, Waxing_Kibbous said:

I've had about 10 rescues now in my current game, in the past I've always just stopped tracking the "hulks," but lately I've been changing the status to debris instead. My last session I've noticed a bit of slowdown in the framerate, perhaps because of this? What are the pros and cons of either method?

Best method is to use the "awesome power of the fully operational battle station" (aka the Tracking Station) to terminate them.

[Waxing_Kibbous]

Hmmm, not sure what the issue was then, heck maybe something was running on my machine in the background at the time. Good advice all around though

Anyhow, not sure if this a potato, Intel Core2Quad @ 2.66GHz, Nvidia 9600GT. I do have 8GB RAM tho on a 64 bit linux system