Solved My Slow Load Times- Best Thing I've EVER learned about KSP

[OscarWilde]

I'm genuinely ecstatic right now; SO I felt a need to post this in case it reaches one random individual and alters their KSP life FOREVER.

I've been playing KSP for over 800 hours and since day one I've been plagued by SLOW load times. Like 20+ minutes with all of my mods installed...

I randomly just stumbled upon a thread on here talking about it and someone suggested that the program Hamachi caused this bug..

Frankly, I didn't even know it was a bug! I thought it was something EVERYONE dealt with!

Uninstalled Hamachi (rarely use it...) and KSP loaded in less than 60 seconds!!

You have no idea how happy this makes me!

I've loaded up KSP probably a few hundred times and every time I have waited unnecessarily long... imagine all those wasted 19 minutes... what better use I could have put them to!!

So hopefully this helps someone.. before getting buried in the forums! Anyone have even a slight guess why a random program like Hamachi would cause ridiculously slow load times? and how on earth did someone actually debug that and figure out that it was even the source of the problem... amazing!

[TMS]

I'm amazed anyone would consider a 20 minute load time as being normal???

Interesting that a VPN would have such an impact though.

[SaturnV]

Amazed too. WHY did you think it's normal?

It's even slower than installing KSP!

I guess your client try to connect steam with VPN....after 20 minutes he finally made it.

[Linear]

Probably taking up CPU/HDD resources?

[Skipants]

I had the same issue. after digging around on Google for a bit I found someone saying something about Hamachi and Unity not getting along. So I uninstalled and bam KSP loaded up way faster.

Rather odd thing. I'm sure there are more people out there with this issue.

[NecroBones]

Wow, 20 minutes??? No wonder I've seen threads about people finding things to do while waiting for the game to load. I never understood that, since mine fires up in about 30 seconds even with a bunch of mods in it.

EDIT: That's actually more like a minute and 30 seconds (I timed it), not just 30 seconds. Usually I'm looking at an email or something while it's loading, so I never took too much notice of the actual time.

Edited February 1, 2015 by NecroBones

[Norpo]

Hm, would having a TON of stuff on your harddrive affect it as well?

Mine fires up in ~7 minutes, with (somewhat) part heavy mods and active texture management (or whatever it's called). My 451 GB harddrive has 85.3 GB remaining (According to Windows), would clearing it out have some noticeable affect on loading times? (I don't have hamachi, so that's not the problem), not 20 minutes, but certainly a far cry from "30 second" loading times. Would defragging/anything else help as well?

Most of the stuff on the hard drive is probably useless junk now...

[Sirrobert]

What the hell is Hamachi?

Edited January 31, 2015 by Sirrobert

[Blaster]

After fixing the VPN issue, you can really speed up loading by having and using an SSD instead of a hard drive.

[OscarWilde]

What the hell is Hamachi?

It's a virtual private network; from my (very limited) understanding, it enables you to have a private connection with someone (or their computer, rather..) over a public connection. I used to use it for multiplayer gaming. It was like using a LAN connection with a friend who's 100 miles away.

WHY did you think it's normal?

It's because it was like this from day one! I always thought it was terrible and annoying; but I never experienced anything else! Seems really stupid now looking back.

Woke up this morning and it's still working too! Felt like it was to good to be true last night

[PDCWolf]

You guys should also try (and REALLY BOTHER SQUAD TO INCLUDE AS STOCK) DDSLoader.

[RainDreamer]

Kind of off topic, and possibly unfounded rumor, but I have heard people talking about hamachi doing some shenanigans to computer. My SO doesn't trust it and want me to use Tunngle instead.

[Zuqq]

I'm definitely one of those people who thought longer loading times was sort of normal.... Im a touch disheartened to see that my load times are obviously a bit whacky. I do not have Hamachi, and am curious to how I would achieve a sub-minute load time. Is there any other known programs that don't play well with Unity/KSP?

[SkyRender]

I remember getting hit by that problem and helping diagnose it. It's due to a bug in how Unity handles its http:// calls, which is how pretty much every resource in KSP is called. Unity will attempt to access all active internet connections when calling that function, even if the call is completely local. If you have an active-but-not-connected internet connection, it will sit there waiting for a "no response" from that connection before trying the next one. Again, this happens even with local file calls, and should not happen at all. It's a very long-standing Unity bug; it's been on the list of requested fixes for at least a year and a half now.

Edited January 31, 2015 by SkyRender

[Zuqq]

I remember getting hit by that problem and helping diagnose it. It's due to a bug in how Unity handles its http:// calls, which is how pretty much every resource in KSP is called. Unity will attempt to access all active internet connections when calling that function, even if the call is completely local. If you have an active-but-not-connected internet connection, it will sit there waiting for a "no response" from that connection before trying the next one. Again, this happens even with local file calls, and should not happen at all. It's a very long-standing Unity bug; it's been on the list of requested fixes for at least a year and a half now.

Is there anything someone can do user-end to speed this process up?

[SkyRender]

Is there anything someone can do user-end to speed this process up?

Disable all internet connections in Control Panel save the one(s) that are actually active. That will bypass the bug, since Unity at least is not stupid enough to try to make calls to disabled internet connections. If KSP starts loading super-slow again, odds are good that some program (usually Hamachi) has sneakily created a new internet connection without your permission. Just go back into Control Panel and disable that new internet connection as well if that happens.

[Ikaneko]

I usually am able to get a coffee and drink most of it in the time it takes my KSP to load, that might be why I'm mainly playing other games (Who am I kidding? I'm just going here)

I shall look into this.

Also, thanks for the tip! Gimme a name so that I can smother them with rep!!

[Renegrade]

It's due to a bug in how Unity handles its http:// calls, which is how pretty much every resource in KSP is called. Unity will attempt to access all active internet connections when calling that function, even if the call is completely local. If you have an active-but-not-connected internet connection, it will sit there waiting for a "no response" from that connection before trying the next one. Again, this happens even with local file calls, and should not happen at all. It's a very long-standing Unity bug; it's been on the list of requested fixes for at least a year and a half now.

What the foxtrot? You're kidding, right? Tell me that's a joke... please? :C

So.. how many other uhhh.. how do I put this nicely (ie, without about forty swear words and/or smashing of keyboards) .... infelicities does Unity have? When it's mapping UV coordinates, does it try to initialize every printer attached to the system? Does it find elements in a list by assigning each one a unique binary pattern and then scanning the entire system core memory for those patterns? Does it sort said lists by ordering them randomly and checking to see if they're sorting, repeating until done?

[OscarWilde]

I usually am able to get a coffee and drink most of it in the time it takes my KSP to load, that might be why I'm mainly playing other games (Who am I kidding? I'm just going here)

I shall look into this.

Also, thanks for the tip! Gimme a name so that I can smother them with rep!!

Not sure he's the original but this was the forum I found it under: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/96675-25-slow-loading-time-really-slow

Post number 7 from "Claw" was what tipped me off!

[cantab]

What the foxtrot? You're kidding, right? Tell me that's a joke... please? :C

So.. how many other uhhh.. how do I put this nicely (ie, without about forty swear words and/or smashing of keyboards) .... infelicities does Unity have?

From how I've seen KSP behave, I infer that its code is a serious mess, though I don't know what bits are Unity's and what are Squad's. From my experience playing some other games, I believe that buggy spaghetti code is normal in video games.

[micha]

Biggest speed-up for loading KSP for me was getting an SSD. Made a huge difference over a normal harddrive.

[SpenSpaceCorp]

For me, my load times seem to be extremely long, I just shut off my internet button on my laptop and it speeds it right up. Otherwise, it almost does not load.

[SkyRender]

I'd estimate that at least 50% of KSP's issues stem from Unity's quirks, bugs, glitches, and design oversights. A game can only be as good as the engine it's coded in allows it to be, after all.

On the subject of when this bug was first uncovered, it was around version 0.20 or so. They switched over to HTTP loading since it's faster than Unity's default loading, not realizing that Unity had such a glaring bug in it regarding enabled-but-disconnected internet connections. Before we knew about that being the root cause, we were checking for all sorts of possible causes: CPU manufacturer, RAM, hard drive manufacturer... In the end, someone who had discovered the issue in a different Unity-based game and solved it for that game clued us in to the issue with HTTP loading, and there was much rejoicing.

If you want to see this absurd problem solved, SQUAD is not who you need to pick on; Unity's developers are. They're the ones who have not only had the bug in place for over a year and a half, but also done nothing to fix it even though it affects every single game that uses that routine to load resources. And most Unity games do now, since HTTP loading is literally twice as fast as the normal file load routines, outside of this glaring issue.

[xnorb]

Biggest speed-up for loading KSP for me was getting an SSD. Made a huge difference over a normal harddrive.

I know, i know, just install the games you actively play on the SSD, but hey, i play lots of games

(And my SSD only has about 20Gb left)

[NecroBones]

Just a point about getting SSDs:

You'll see a nice improvement if you're blocking on disk access, which can happen if you have a particularly slow disk (such as on some laptops), and/or you're swapping like crazy due to insufficient RAM and/or you have a lot of software running in the background that's using up that RAM.

However, if you have a lot of RAM and a fairly good hard drive, you're almost certainly going to be blocking on CPU and NOT the disk access speed, as far as KSP is concerned, in which case switching to a SSD will show a negligible improvement in KSP's loading time.

This is worth pointing out, because I'd hate to see people run off and buy SSDs expecting it to solve everything, when it's not going to improve KSP all that much for everyone.