Pathological loading times
Zazazu:
Quote from: PolecatEZ on 2010 December 06, 14:44:59
Quote from: BaronElectricPhase on 2010 December 06, 14:19:25
Defragment your Hard Drive
Back in the day, I used to bench my tech support guys that did this or advised this as a solution to anyone. Defrag hasn't been a real solution for anything since Win95/98. Basically, its irrelevant on an NTFS system, especially one that has good built-in background defrag.
You say this, but have you ever tested a rather low-end (but current) system that is 30% fragmented right after it has been defragged? Trust me, it makes a huge difference.
I do it monthly, but I'm very controlling with how clean and organized my system is.
One thing I noticed absolutely killed my loading times was CC, but more specifically the number of CC files. Merging cc into megafiles (and keeping the raw files somewhere on backup just in case) cut my load time, which had been around 5 or 6 minutes with just around 50 files, to less than 30 seconds. Now, I think I have 800 files merged into 12 and my load time is just around a minute.
Soltis:
PolecatEZ, I doubt it's HD speed, because of two factors:
1. If IO was a big issue, the game ought to load slowly in general -- and my save files aren't big enough to (alone) be inducing enough IO load to make a difference.
2. The game loading slower every time I return to the main menu (not the launcher) suggests a memory leak, possibly caused by corrupt data (or simple stupidity on the game's part)
3. My HDD is relatively new/fast; the 300 GB Raptor -- so not exactly in SSD territory, obviously, but no slouch. I've got the OS and apps on separate drives, and no swap file, so most extraneous issues of that nature are also taken care of.
As for CC, I just tried removing *all of it*, clearing every cache I could find, and loading the same saved games; it didn't make a difference.
The reason I didn't bother before is, wouldn't CC-related slowness be apparent from the start?
Keep in mind that the *game* loads just as fast as it ever has; it's only loading a saved game which takes longer and longer.
Soltis:
Quote from: Madame Mim on 2010 December 06, 00:37:14
Obviously it's due to the endU virus (also known as PEBKAC) - you used the word pathological not me.
If you want to bandy pretty semantics, the term also has a comp sci meaning referring to algorithmic behaviour which grows geometrically or exponentially; I could easily induce hour-long loading times with this little problem, if I just kept returning to the main menu and re-loading.
It bears mention that making foolish assumptions about situations one doesn't really understand is the actual basis of most ID 10 T and PEBKAC errors.
PolecatEZ:
Quote from: Soltis on 2010 December 07, 02:06:14
PolecatEZ, I doubt it's HD speed, because of two factors:
1. If IO was a big issue, the game ought to load slowly in general -- and my save files aren't big enough to (alone) be inducing enough IO load to make a difference.
2. The game loading slower every time I return to the main menu (not the launcher) suggests a memory leak, possibly caused by corrupt data (or simple stupidity on the game's part)
3. My HDD is relatively new/fast; the 300 GB Raptor -- so not exactly in SSD territory, obviously, but no slouch. I've got the OS and apps on separate drives, and no swap file, so most extraneous issues of that nature are also taken care of.
As for CC, I just tried removing *all of it*, clearing every cache I could find, and loading the same saved games; it didn't make a difference.
The reason I didn't bother before is, wouldn't CC-related slowness be apparent from the start?
Keep in mind that the *game* loads just as fast as it ever has; it's only loading a saved game which takes longer and longer.
When you say no swap file, does that mean none on your gaming drive, or none whatsoever? Just asking, because Sims 3 is horrible at memory management, happily ignoring 10 extra gigs of ram in favor of HD thrashing. There's also some utilities that will actively periodically free up RAM that is no longer in use, such as the monitor with PowerPack 2.3.2+, which can help with some memory leaks depending on the timer setting.
Another utility that I found helped quite well is RAMdisk, create a 4GB vHDD at 32bit and then have Windows 7 use the whole small thing as virtual memory. Sims 3 will happily chew on that, and it also helps use that extra RAM you paid for :)
Soltis:
No swap file anywhere; I never get above 70% RAM utilization, particularly since most apps I would actually push hard *coughs3pecough* are (at least currently) compiled as 32-bit and thus can't really consume all that much to begin with.
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