[Rails-devel] An ongoing rails issue

[Mike B. <com...@ip...>]

This is not a bug per se, but it's something that needs to be mentioned, and
even improved or resolved before rails can be offered as fully functional to
the public.

Rails 1.7.x becomes deadly slow towards the end of a game. In today's game,
I clicked on "no token" for the second-last turn in the last op round and
had to wait more than five minutes (closer to eight) before the game
progressed to calculating the revenue for that particular company. 1835 is
especially bad in this respect because of the potential for a company to
have multiple diesels, and is almost unplayable as a result.

Note that this problem occurs with ALL actions in an op round. A company
starts its turn. Click on a hex on the map to indicate where you want to lay
a tile, wait five-to-ten minutes. The available tiles are offered, click on
one, wait 5-10 minutes. The tile is then laid, click on it to rotate it
until correct facing is achieved - wait another 5-10 minutes before the
first rotation takes effect. Click on "lay tile", wait another 5-10 minutes
before the game progresses to tokens. Click on a tile to lay a token, wait
for 5-10 minutes before the option to lay a token in that space is
displayed. Click on the lay token button, or on the no token button, wait
another 5-10 minutes before revenue calculations start. Wait up to an hour
for revenue calculations to be complete (or wait at least 5-10 minutes for a
value that's close if not equal to the final revenue valuation to be
achieved) and click Set Revenue, wait 5-10 minutes before being given the
option of how to distribute that revenue. Click one of the buttons and wait
another 5-10 minutes for the option to buy trains (if applicable). And so
on. Clicking on "game" on the game status window menu produces another wait
of 5-10 minutes before the menu is displayed. Clicking save game produces a
wait of 5-20 minutes before the save game window appears. Clicking save does
nothing for another 5-10 minutes.

All this appears to be due to the game consuming 100% available CPU and
wanting more.

It's understandable that as brown tiles becomes available and the variety
and length of possible routes increases, it takes longer to determine the
optimum route. Nevertheless, this all seems excessive, and should have no
impact on actions like "save game".

I have found that the problem can be reduced (not eliminated) temporarily by
saving the game, closing rails, and then reopening it, so it appears in part
to be a problem with the size of the log file (which is always smaller after
doing so than it was), but this is not the whole issue by any means.

My system is relatively slow by modern standards - only 2.65GHz -
exacerbating the problem. In combination with the "loading a saved game"
improvement mentioned a moment ago, I suspect that this is the reason no
players have noticed / complained about the problem in past testing.

To assess the true scale of the issue, would it be possible to include an
option to turn logging off in the game setup panel for 1.7.6? I can
understand why logging in general is both desirable and comprehensive while
the game is still in a beta-testing mode, but I think this needs further
investigation. SOMETHING is happening repeatedly in all those CPU cycles
that bogs the whole game down to a slow crawl.

I also have some thoughts on an alternative top-level process for handling
revenue calculations but they *might* not yield any improvement (might even
be worse) and have a wishlist for functionality enhancements, but they are
unimportant in comparison to this issue.

Mike Bourke
Campaign Mastery http://www.campaignmastery.com
Co-author, Assassin's Amulet http://www.legaciescampaignsetting.com




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