Strangely reduced performance

[Psycho_zs]

Running KSP on current Debian testing, Core i7-3540M. Using performance CPU governor.

Game runs at 30-80% of nominal speed even in KSC (Time control mod readout), depending on amount of visible terrain and (obviously) by quantity of parts in physics bubble. But it never reaches 100% even in ideal conditions (minimum partcount ship in space, or KSC scene without flights. Tested with stock KSP + Time Control for speed readout).

The twist is: at some semi-random point in the running game some magic happens and performance gets restored to 100% all the way until the game is closed. Changing scenes or loading a save does not revert this once it happens. No events reported in console when it happens. I once thought "Increased PQ Cache" messages may be related, but it happened without them.

This event seems to have some affinity to a point near splashdown, but may also happen at any time.

So the game is perfectly capable of running smooth, but it does not.

Is there some way to see resource usage by tasks inside KSP? Some kind of 'top' mod?

Edited March 5, 2017 by Psycho_zs

[worir4]

You can see the resource usage with the alt-f12 menu. 

Also as for the performance changes i used to have a similar problem. My graphics card got very hot when i started playing because the fans took a while to spin up. This meant that the performance was throttled back to prevent over heating. After a few minutes though the fans got fast enough to cool it down and everything went back to normal. Maybe you could have a similar problem?

[Psycho_zs]

I doubt it. Fan reaction time on my laptop is pretty short, recent cleaning dropped operational temperatures pretty significantly, but the issue was unaffected. Besides, it can happen in a wide time range, from 10 minutes to a couple of hours.

[worir4]

The only other thing i can think of is maybe you have some background programs running. If you have an antivirus scan scheduled it can slow performance until it is complete. 

[Psycho_zs]

I can't think of any external factors. And that pre-splashdown situation seem to really trigger the performance boost. I now start the game with a sandbox session deorbiting a simple ship from LKO, then proceeding to career save )

[worir4]

Hmm, First i would try to play it without your mods to see if that fixes it. Remove one mod at a time so you can narrow down which one causes it.

If nothing else, you could try to verify the games files if you have it on steam or you could try a reinstall. Other than that i have no idea what it could be. Sorry.

Edited March 6, 2017 by worir4

[Psycho_zs]

I tried it with no mods except for Time control for readout.

...more details: return to proper 100% speed occurs after using stock physics timewarp in the atmosphere after returning from space. I will test more situations later.

[Psycho_zs]

Apparently, using stock physics 4x timewarp anywhere for more than several seconds can clear this slowdown. It's just that atmosphere is the only place I had a reason to use it.