Extreme Disk Activity with Linux Client

[MWAAAHAAA]

Hi,

I have recently installed planeshift on both linux and win98. Now as it turns out under windows the game runs very smoothly. Under linux however, there is a LOT of disk activity, it seems to swap data to and from the disk all the time, causing the game to become extremely jerky, and load times becoming excessive. At the certain point there is so much disk activity, that my box just freezes for a couple of minutes and crashes afterwards. Anyone has had any similar problems (perhaps with other programs?), and knows what the problem might be?
BTW both linux and windows are running on the same computer in case you\'re wondering.

[Platyna]

It happens to me very offten, especially after I switched to 2.6. Set \"load
all maps on startup\" so you will have no problem with loading during the
gameplay.

Regards.

[MWAAAHAAA]

I tried to do that, both under 2.4 and 2.6. You\'re right though, 2.4 seems to much more \"efficient\" in terms of using the hard disk; in any case it loads much faster. At about 90% though, 2.6 just freezes, and 2.4 kills the process (775 Killed). I\'ve got 512 MB of RAM and a about 240 megs of swap space. Doesn\'t seem to be enough.

In windows I had to turn of sound to get reasonably performance, so I tried the same under linux, and guess what... the disk activity stopped almost completely. I have superb load times now too. But no sound :/... The soundcard I\'m using is pretty old though, it might have something to do with that.

[Platyna]

You may try to limit FPS to minimize usage of CPU/RAM in your client
options or you may built it from source without debug.

Regards.

[orogor]

Yhea  build  without debug will help a LOT, also check ram consumption of PS ,  maybe 250Meg swap isn t enought ( and thats  why the kernel kills it )

[MWAAAHAAA]

You can play online with a custom build PS? The sources are from CVS I take it, or is there a seperate package available?

Yeah I checked the memory consumption. Both RAM and cache are completely filled, so that makes like 700 megs, that\'s a lot!

[Androgos]

Eh?

I thought the general swap allocation limit was from the memory you have to the double amount (512-1024)?

[Tharizdun]

Am I the only one to have found the 2.6 kernel making things faster rather than slower compared to 2.4? It has made UI responsiveness superior to  2.4, even when the disk is being heavily utilised. And thats on a single cpu, with hyperthreading or SMP it should really tower over 2.4.

Use hdparm to activate dma, unmaskirq, and 32-bit IO on your harddrive if you havent done so already, all newish systems should support these options and it will make heavy disk operations easier on the system as a whole.

Shutdown anything that will take up ram that you dont need to be active when running planeshift - apache,  samba, mysql, bind, whatever, and try using xfce / blackbox or some other light WM rather than full gnome or kde.

MWAAAHAAA, yeah when compiling it yourself you can ditch debug flags and get smaller & faster executables. CrystalSpace in particular benefits a lot from a couple of optimisations due to all the heavy graphics stuff it does.

[MWAAAHAAA]

Androgos:

Yeah that used to be the general rule of thumb, until RAM sizes became very large. When not running any memory intensive applications there\'s no point inhaving huge amounts of swap anyway. I never really needed it either, that is up till now perhaps

Tharizdun:

Actually things do not get \'slowed down\' by 2.6, it just seems that disk activity increses with each new kernel. When I switched from 2.2 to 2.4, I noticed that my box kept hanging every few seconds when copying files or doing other disk io (of course slowing down the whole process of io as well...). That\'s when I got myself a new bunch of connector cables and enabled dma. That got rid of the problem. I really havent noticed any differences between 2.6 and 2.4 until I tried running ps with 2.4.

Anyway, I had some other minor problems with my soundcard anyway, so I decided to buy a new one a couple of days ago, I\'ll keep you posted on whether that gives me some performance gain or not.

[MWAAAHAAA]

Well, I found out something interesting. I accidentally switched to one of the ttys (that\'s what they\'re called right?) while playing PS, when switching back to X, the game ran much smoother. No excessive disk activity anymore, and a playable framerate, even with sound enabled. This occurred after I installed the new soundcard BTW.

I also noticed another thing. Before switching back to text mode, I could actually use mouselook in first person mode. After switching back to X, I can only use mouselook to look vertically around the scene, i.e. I can only look up and down, not sideways. Should I report this as a bug somewhere?