reported WWII aircraft cause extreme load times stage 'Spawn objects'

[Buzzer1977]

'Spawn Objects' takes very very long on missions with WWII aircraft.
The same map "channel" with Mossy, Spitfire IX CW and Dora takes 1 Minute and 6 seconds to load.
Changing the AC to P47, P51 and Fw109 results in comparable 1 Minute and 11 seconds load time.
Replacing the Aircraft with AV-8B, F/A-18c and F-5E reduces load time to ONLY 8 seconds !!!

Larger WWII scenarios take several minutes to load. I've added the three missions to demonstrate the bug.

 DCS 2.7.6.12852 Open Beta.

TRAINING_CHANNEL_MOS_SPFIXCW-DORA-1min-6sec.miz TRAINING_CHANNEL_P47_P51-109.miz TRAINING_CHANNEL_TODAY.miz

[Surrexen]

Further to this, there also appears to be an issue when dynamically spawning WWII aircraft into a mission, there is a much bigger pause now when activating a plane (multiple seconds to activate instead of milliseconds). If you dynamically spawn in a modern jet there is no problem with it.

[Slice313]

I noticed this too. Longer loading  times since last beta. 

[peachpossum]

We had trouble with Operation Jupiter last night (Surrexen's WWII based dynamic mission). It got hung up on Spawn Objects and would cause DCS to not respond. 

[Hog_driver]

Confirmed. Loading a mission in the Jagdflieger campaign takes much longer now. And when I tried to load some Mossie missions, the system stopped responding.

[Surrexen]

2 hours ago, peachpossum said:

We had trouble with Operation Jupiter last night (Surrexen's WWII based dynamic mission). It got hung up on Spawn Objects and would cause DCS to not respond. 

 

Indeed. Here I was going to update Jupiter and Crystal Sea to include the Mosquito but at the moment those missions are hosed. Likewise missions like Operation Jericho are also hosed.

[GDD]

+1

[FoxTwo]

Yeah. Wonder why there's no acknowledgement of this issue. It's very strange, it hangs on Spawning Objects and it doesn't even seem like it's really doing anything. No IO thrashing and CPU isn't going nuts.

[Pikey]

Hi folks I got this reported to the ED team today, it was fairly easy to reproduce once I worked out which units caused it.

In the interim, I've got a suggestion to mitigate the issue, it's something like 2 seconds per WW2 plane added to the load time. So it affects missions with large unit counts of missions. As a yardstick consider 2 seconds per plane unit.  So at about 100 WW2 planes its 200 seconds on my PC. Some were more than others. There's no other issue than the waiting till its ready, after load its fine. Obviously that doesn't help dedicated servers reloading etc

1 hour ago, FoxTwo said:

Yeah. Wonder why there's no acknowledgement of this issue. It's very strange, it hangs on Spawning Objects and it doesn't even seem like it's really doing anything. No IO thrashing and CPU isn't going nuts.

I dunno, the team were quiet today, they've got a lot of feedback to process, maybe that's it?

 

On 9/19/2021 at 4:00 AM, Surrexen said:

Further to this, there also appears to be an issue when dynamically spawning WWII aircraft into a mission, there is a much bigger pause now when activating a plane (multiple seconds to activate instead of milliseconds). If you dynamically spawn in a modern jet there is no problem with it.

I'll ask Ben to add that and refer this thread.

Edited September 20, 2021 by Pikey
typo

[Starfire13]

This bug is making it a massive pain to play any campaigns with large numbers of WW2 aircraft, such as any Liberation campaigns with WW2 factions. Some testing I did earlier showed performance degradation tied directly to number of WW2 aircraft, as replacing one faction with a non-WW2 one reduces load times.

 

Allies 1944 vs Germany 1944 - 04:02
Allies 1944 vs Russia 2010 - 03:11
USA 2005 vs Germany 1944 - 01:24
USA 2005 vs Russia 2010 - 00:06

 

Edit: To clarify, the reason why Allies 1944 takes longer to load than Germany 1944 is because the Allies have 3 airfields (and thus more WW2 aircraft impacted by this bug) while the Germans have only 1 airfield.

Edited September 22, 2021 by Starfire13

[rayrayblues]

On 9/18/2021 at 6:51 PM, Buzzer1977 said:

'Spawn Objects' takes very very long on missions with WWII aircraft.
The same map "channel" with Mossy, Spitfire IX CW and Dora takes 1 Minute and 6 seconds to load.
Changing the AC to P47, P51 and Fw109 results in comparable 1 Minute and 11 seconds load time.
Replacing the Aircraft with AV-8B, F/A-18c and F-5E reduces load time to ONLY 8 seconds !!!

Larger WWII scenarios take several minutes to load. I've added the three missions to demonstrate the bug.

 DCS 2.7.6.12852 Open Beta.

TRAINING_CHANNEL_MOS_SPFIXCW-DORA-1min-6sec.miz 12.95 kB · 4 downloads TRAINING_CHANNEL_P47_P51-109.miz 12.58 kB · 4 downloads TRAINING_CHANNEL_TODAY.miz 14.69 kB · 5 downloads

 

19 hours ago, Pikey said:

Hi folks I got this reported to the ED team today, it was fairly easy to reproduce once I worked out which units caused it.
 

 

 

Good to know. I thought it was just my antique rig   

[Buzzer1977]

On 9/20/2021 at 9:24 PM, Pikey said:

Hi folks I got this reported to the ED team today, it was fairly easy to reproduce once I worked out which units caused it.

It seems it got worse with DCS 2.7.6.13133 Open Beta. It's now an additional ~30 seconds in step 'Export Start' ...

[Surrexen]

1 hour ago, Buzzer1977 said:

It seems it got worse with DCS 2.7.6.13133 Open Beta. It's now an additional ~30 seconds in step 'Export Start' ...

 

Yes I agree it seems worse after the last patch and am seeing the same thing you are with 'export start'.

[BIGNEWY]

this has been reported to the team.

 

thanks

[peachpossum]

I just downloaded today's OB patch, ran a quick repair, and then loaded Surrexen's Operation Jupiter mission into the Mission Editor. I added a couple of Client Mossies and ran the mission from within the editor. Seems to run fine now after the patch.

I am getting a lot of errors when I look at my log file, mainly to do with textures and DX11 shaders. I don't know if I should be worried about those errors in the log file, for all I know they have been there for a while.

dcs.log

[Flappie]

These are no "real" errors: DCS says it cannot find precompiled textures, and then says it's compiling them. If you launch DCS now and then run the same mission, you shouldn't get the compiling messages this time.

 

Also, the mission you're talking about seems to have some scripting issue:

 

2021-09-30 16:21:13.646 ERROR   SCRIPTING: Mission script error: [string "C:\Users\possum\AppData\Local\Temp\DCS\/~mis0000472A.lua"]:54: attempt to index global 'lfs' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
	[C]: ?
	[string "C:\Users\possum\AppData\Local\Temp\DCS\/~mis0000472A.lua"]:54: in function 'file_exists'
	[string "C:\Users\possum\AppData\Local\Temp\DCS\/~mis0000472A.lua"]:105: in main chunk

 

[dorianR666]

On 10/1/2021 at 9:55 PM, Flappie said:

Also, the mission you're talking about seems to have some scripting issue:

Thats forgotten removal of Lua sanitization. lfs is namespace for filesystem access functions.

Probably because of the repair.