Question on persistent debris

[Levelord]

I was wondering if having persistent debris enabled slows down KSP in general. While I know these debris are on rails until you are operating them directly or are within 2.2Km, does it still put any processing stresses to have them around?

Has anyone experienced any problem with having debris around?

[astropapi1]

Well, common sense tells me your computer still has to calculate the flight path of every "ship" in the game, but it should not be that much of a problem.

[Kimberly]

Having a large number of anything in orbit can slow down the game, but it's much less big of a deal than parts being actively simulated.

[PrivateFlip]

It's just a location on an orbit based on the time so it's a a small fraction compared to an simulated vessel.

[Vanamonde]

A thing to consider is that even if objects do not add to lag beyond 2.25kms, the more objects of any kind that exist in your game, the longer quick/autosaves and quickloads take.

[arq]

It shouldn't be terribly devastating on your system's performance.

[Tiron]

A thing to consider is that even if objects do not add to lag beyond 2.25kms, the more objects of any kind that exist in your game, the longer quick/autosaves and quickloads take.

As he says. It's mostly a memory thing: Once they're outside of about 2.4 KM or so they go 'on rails', and cease to have physics calculations performed on them. This means there's a minimal performance hit, but it still has to be loaded and tracked. The tracking is easy because the orbit is strictly defined, but if you have enough of them it could spike your memory usage beyond the 4GB limit and then you're in crashville.

[PrivateFlip]

As he says. It's mostly a memory thing: Once they're outside of about 2.4 KM or so they go 'on rails', and cease to have physics calculations performed on them. This means there's a minimal performance hit, but it still has to be loaded and tracked. The tracking is easy because the orbit is strictly defined, but if you have enough of them it could spike your memory usage beyond the 4GB limit and then you're in crashville.

I don't know about that. The way i see it these packed vessels are described by a couple of kb, the majority of memory is in the models of the part which are loaded once irregardless whether they are used zero or a thousand time, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

[leax256]

short answer: yes but it takes alot.

[Tiron]

I don't know about that. The way i see it these packed vessels are described by a couple of kb, the majority of memory is in the models of the part which are loaded once irregardless whether they are used zero or a thousand time, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Actually it's more likely to be the textures hogging up memory than the models... but I digress. Yeah, individual instances of stuff won't take up that much memory... but it'll be highly variable depending on the number of parts involved. Trick being, each piece might be a minor hit, but if you just spam absurd amounts of junk floating around, I strongly suspect it'd hit the memory harder than the CPU. I could be wrong, though.

[humptydump]

Actually it's more likely to be the textures hogging up memory than the models... but I digress. Yeah, individual instances of stuff won't take up that much memory... but it'll be highly variable depending on the number of parts involved. Trick being, each piece might be a minor hit, but if you just spam absurd amounts of junk floating around, I strongly suspect it'd hit the memory harder than the CPU. I could be wrong, though.

Are you sure that they even load the models? It should be unnecessary for calculating orbits.

[RocketPilot573]

They do seem to hurt performance... Once I launched over 700 debris, and the Kerbal X upper-stage (which is like 5 parts) lagged as if I was flying a 1000 part rocket. So yes, too many debris can be bad.

[Coneshot]

After finishing out my tech tree in career mode, Kerbin has more rings than Saturn! I'll admit to being really sloppy on this save, but in spite of the junkyard I have in orbit, I'm not seeing any effect on performance. (LKO looks like the beginning of the "Sing for absolution" video by Muse!)

[flyboy67109]

I'm running KSP on a laptop so my resources are limited. Once it get over 100 pieces of debris in space, I see a significant lag. The other day, I decided to do something about it. First, I went into the tracking station and looked for any debris that was "landed" on Kerbin and recovered the debris. I viewed this as sending a truck and getting someone to pick it up. Second, I build a garbage collector and sent into space to scoop up the debris and alter it's orbit to crash on the surface starting with Kerbin and then the Mun. I'm now down to 18 pieces of debris and hope to take out 3 more tonight. My clock is once again green instead of a solid yellow. And, I've gotten much better with my rendezvous.

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

It can affect performance, but it takes a metric exa-tonne to do so

[Brotoro]

Somebody posted a thread about this (back in December, I think), and he was getting a much greater lag effect from debris and other ships (outside of the rendering range) than I would have expected.

[Starstrider42]

I'm running KSP on a laptop so my resources are limited. Once it get over 100 pieces of debris in space, I see a significant lag.

Seconded. I also got problems past 100 debris on a laptop. The quickest solution is to lower the persistent debris limit in the options menu.