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

[boxman]

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

I have never really noticed a big improvement that way compared to using 7200rpm hd. Might make a difference with heavily modded KSP, but otherwise the hard drive really does not seem to be much of a bottleneck when it comes to loading times. I even tried putting it on a ram disk and it made very little difference and the little difference it made will not make a difference on second run if you have loads of ram like me and have it cached in memory most of the time.

But with a slower laptop disk running at 5400rpm will probably see a huge improvement with ssd or if you have only 4gigs of ram. If you have a decent hard drive and 8gigs of ram or more then there really is not much point in getting a ssd just for KSP.

Edited February 1, 2015 by boxman

[cantab]

Agreed. I think Micha's experience is the exception. KSP takes a while to load because it's converting file formats for the game files, and that runs on the CPU. The DDSLoader mod helps with this and is probably worth a look if you want the game to load quicker and you've ruled out the networking issue mentioned here.

And a question. Does the networking issue affect KSP on Linux, or is it just a Windows issue?

[kinnison]

Mine is less then 2 minutes, I do have a lot of mods (not as much as some). Just enough time to get a drink or go to the bathroom, or steep some tea

I would stop playing a game if it took me 20 minutes to load

[OscarWilde]

http://i.imgur.com/26ZEmgN.jpg

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)

You have a 1TB SSD? Geeze... I have a hard time justifying 500++ $$ for 1tb of storage. you can get a standard 1tb HDD for like $80... and $500 was being generous; some 1tb SSDs are like 1000$+. How much did you pay for yours? Or am I confused about your post and that isn't actually an SSD drive you're showing?

[Renegrade]

From my experience playing some other games, I believe that buggy spaghetti code is normal in video games.

Yeah, I'm gettin' that feeling too. :/

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.

True. If the libraries you're linking to are garbage, there's little you can do if there's no workarounds.

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.

...wat?

I'm now very curious as to why this is the case, but also absolutely terrified of the horror which is the answer.

I've often maintained that it's easier to write new code from scratch than maintain someone else's alphabet soup ("I could eat alphabet soup and uh.. pass better code than this."), but it was always been a semi-joke. I think it gets closer to being hard truth than just a bit of evil hyperbole with every passing day...

[Venusgate]

I don't understand. Why would you need to load your game even a second time?

[hellblazer]

Its your hardware. I have about 15 mods installed and it takes 30-45 seconds max. After a clean install 15-20 seconds.

[micha]

Agreed. I think Micha's experience is the exception. KSP takes a while to load because it's converting file formats for the game files, and that runs on the CPU.

*shrug* Just reporting what I noticed. My machine only has 4GB RAM, but I run Debian with Windowmaker which fully loaded only uses a couple hundred MB - so definitely not swapping even after loading up a medium-modded game (getting very close to using up my full 4GB though! Unfortunately the motherboard is so old it's not worth buying more RAM for it, will have to get a new machine at some point.)

I put the speed improvement down to KSP loading LOTS of small files, and hence SSD reducing the seek time significantly. Can't remember what HDD I have (as in, RPM, will need to check) but it definitely isn't a specifically gaming/performance one. In either case it wasn't wasted money for me since my desktop now boots up in seconds too..

Actual sustained read/write rates aren't better with SSD, but seek time is practically eliminated. So copying a large file still takes roughly the same amount of time (assuming a reasonably non-fragmented filesystem), but reading/writing lots of small files is MUCH faster.

And a question. Does the networking issue affect KSP on Linux, or is it just a Windows issue?

The only issue slowing down loading on Linux seemed to be having the wrong LANG environment variable set (look in the Linux threads for details) - never noticed anything network-releated slowing down load-times on Linux. Not saying the issue isn't there, but I personally haven't seen it.

[Kerbal101]

I will re-post here, because this is one of the first threads I found when I was trying to solve the problem myself.

I know you have Windows, but I encountered the very same thing on Linux - so, so long this saves somebody the time I wasted solving it myself - its worth it.

Linux 64 bit, Debian Stable (backports for kernel to 4.2 Liquorix and opensource radeon graphics driver)
Athlon II X4, AMD HD5850, 8GiB of RAM

1.0.5 x64 + 50 Mods.

 

Loading times - over 60 minutes (I killed the game each time).

Have tried everything: disabled all networking adapters, used older Module manager, tried Active Texture Management, DDSLoader, Dynamic Texture Loader.
NOTHING helped.

Then, I started to move out the mods, one by one - and BINGO!
The mod "KerbPaint" was to blame. Without KerbPaint loading time is 2 minutes.

I hope this helps somebody!!

EDIT (by the "later" me): This issue was caused by latent "ModuleManager.dll" HIDDEN INSIDE OF PLUG-IN DIRECTORY. Just go inside the plugin and delete this file. Thanks to selfish_meme for persistently pointing this out!! Now no long loading times and KerbPaint works as advertized!

Edited January 16, 2016 by Kerbal101
outdated hideous dll was the reason

[JAFO]

On 6/2/2015 at 9:08 PM, micha said:

Actual sustained read/write rates aren't better with SSD, but seek time is practically eliminated. So copying a large file still takes roughly the same amount of time (assuming a reasonably non-fragmented filesystem), but reading/writing lots of small files is MUCH faster.

Your opinion about sustained read/write rates might change if/when you get to try a M2/SATA3.2 drive.. with transfer rates of 1.97GB/s, it's more than 3 times faster than the typically used SATA3.0, yet relatively few gamers and other performance-oriented users seem aware of its' existence, even though it's been around a couple of years now.

Of course, you'll need a motherboard capable of supporting it (Z97, for instance), but boot times of 7-8 seconds from powered off to desktop loaded have been reported. They said that accurate measurement was difficult, because the desktop had loaded before the monitor had even finished powering up.

Edited January 16, 2016 by JAFO

[TheTom]

On 2/6/2015 at 11:08 AM, micha said:

Actual sustained read/write rates aren't better with SSD, but seek time is practically eliminated. So copying a large file still takes roughly the same amount of time (assuming a reasonably non-fragmented filesystem), but reading/writing lots of small files is MUCH faster..

Wrong. Delusional wrong.

FIrst, please find me a hard disc that delivers 400MB/S under even the best circumstances. None does - SSD regularly do. Heck, we talk of much higher speeds these days if you get a M2 interfaced one - much faster than SATA speeds. But even then, there are 2 issues you love to ignore:

* SATA discs only deliver that for large files

* and when not sharing access at all.

If one of those two conditions is not met (like when loading a lot of small files) then HD speeds drop into the basement. I had a RAID of 8 Raptors (10k RPM discs) deliver an astonishing 10MB/second on large files - due to contention of access times. That is DESPITE a 1gb RAM cache on the dedicated RAID controller. Now 4 SSD allow me to copy files with 1GB/second on that Raid. 

And again, even under optimal conditions SSD are way short of the read speeds of a HD. Even of a SAS 15k RPM HD. And that includes reading one file only that is large and optimally organized on the disc.

The moment you have multi access the head spends most time moving around. Which takes no time on SSD. This includes loading a lot of small files. Which incidentally is what happens in KSP.

But there is NO scenario where the performance of a decent SSD is inferior of a HD. Including size. The biggest HD you can get right now is 10TB in 3.5" form factor. The biggest SSD is - in 2.5" form factor... 13TB.

The big equalizer is still and has always been the price, with SSD being more expensive.

 

[MGCJerry]

On Saturday, January 31, 2015 at 1:18 PM, SkyRender said:

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.

What? This is the most absurd crap I have read in a long time since the steam wiping linux filesystems fiasco.

In what universe was this determined to be the best way to handle *local* files? I know people who would be sitting on the street unemployed begging for stale bread covered in ants if they wrote a garbage procedure like this.

Edited January 16, 2016 by MGCJerry

[Kerbal101]

2 hours ago, MGCJerry said:

What? This is the most absurd crap I have read in a long time since the steam wiping linux filesystems fiasco.

In what universe was this determined to be the best way to handle *local* files? I know people who would be sitting on the street unemployed begging for stale bread covered in ants if they wrote a garbage procedure like this.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

Street unemployed begging people are:

Tim Berners-Lee
 World Wide Web Consortium
 MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, NE43-356
 
Roy T. Fielding
 Department of Information and Computer Science
 University of California, Irvine
 
Larry Masinter
 Xerox PARC

 

Apparently, Unity has just to add a semaphore to the boolean variable regarding the network availability, instead of checking it on every URI open call. But I don't know the details...

 

Edited January 16, 2016 by Kerbal101

[pandaman]

I just got a new machine (with SSD) and now my load time is down to just over 30 seconds, from about 10 minutes on my old rig.  The only mods I use are KAC and KER.  My drive space was fine but the PC was about 7 years old and getting a bit slow generally so it's probably not fair to give the SSD all the credit.

[Curveball Anders]

12 mods according to CKAN and no SSD so it takes about 35 seconds from start to back in a saved game.

[Zoidos]

I've had this issue too. Weirdly, it just suddenly started one day, i was never able to figure out why. Even weirder, i don't use hamachi or any other vpn and the issue disappears only if i disable my lan-controller. Yet even weirder, this only happens at home. On the same pc at my parents' or my gf's mom's house the game loads in about a minute.

The ssd also helps.

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

I found that having my firewall app in "training mode" slows KSP down (framerate-wise).

"Safe mode" was better.

[Kerbal101]

Can you, windows guys, make some script which disables problematic interfaces when game is started for, say,  5 minutes? Just enough time until game loaded itself.

Windows has bash-like PowerShell now, this should be possible. Then you would set this and forget it.

[Curveball Anders]

Windows has had strange issues tcp/ip ever since they grafted it on as a some weird hack.

[Hysterrics]

*Checks to see if I have Hamachi installed*

[Fleb]

Nothing to see here.

Edited January 22, 2016 by Fleb
*Waves hand* This is not the post you are looking for.

[Curveball Anders]

2 hours ago, Sequinox said:

*Checks to see if I have Hamachi installed*

Do check for 'phantom' links created by stuff like wifi, firewire or bluetooth hardware.

Windows have a nasty habit of creating possible links so they can always be at your disposal.

And then spend some serious time waiting for a network timeout on a network that isn't there and often never has been :/

The piece of software responsible for generic network integration isn't the prettiest nor best designed.

[maceemiller]

Well, KSP fires up in under 30 seconds for me. All I do is keep my HDD defragmented and optimised (Auslogics), run CCleaner to clear the junk and sort my registry then run Gboost to stop unnecessary utilities using my RAM. I dont suffer from crashes and KSP runs smoothly for hours.

Edited January 23, 2016 by maceemiller
Spelling

[Guest]

Wow.  What a necro...  Still not the biggest I've seen.  That one was from around 2013.

[Tautologist]

I've been playing on and off for about 4 years and had no idea.  I always figured there were gigabytes of resource files getting loaded into RAM, or the program was not optimized because it's an indie title.  I uninstalled Hamachi while KSP was loading and when the uninstall finished the game loaded in seconds.  Thank you!