FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04. I recently installed the latest stable version (0.4.10) from the PPA. When I loaded up my single-player world I noticed a very annoying lag happening. I'd walk a couple of steps and it would pause for a split second. The background would fog up (which usually happens to me only when I am watching/listening to something while playing Minetest. Later I tried a fresh world without any added mods and the same thing happened. I'm not using any graphics enhancements in the settings either. I have everything off and opaque water on.

I switched back to 0.4.9 and it's fine again.

CPU: Athlon 64 3800+
Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE
RAM: 1GB

Any ideas?

Vincentius_Maximus wrote:RAM: 1GB

Do you use swap? Try running some RAM monitor and watch it when playing. The lag could happen when your RAM is full and it starts writing the memory to swap. That is what happens to me with 2GB.
(This would not explain why 0.4.9 runs fine for you.)

Yeah. I have a swap partition. I don't think I was running at or near 100% capacity on 0.4.10. I certainly am not on 0.4.9. The time when it comes to that is when I run YouTube or CBS.com (Star Trek shows online), while playing Minetest. Even then, with 0.4.9, it is playable. It's not as playable as when I'm JUST running Minetest, but it's playable.

With 0.4.10, it skips even when I don't have anything else running. Mind you, it's a different kind of skip than 0.4.9 + Firefox. It's a "this makes this too annoying to play" skip.

Has anyone else got any ideas?

Vincentius_Maximus wrote:I'm running Ubuntu 12.04. I recently installed the latest stable version (0.4.10) from the PPA. When I loaded up my single-player world I noticed a very annoying lag happening. I'd walk a couple of steps and it would pause for a split second. The background would fog up (which usually happens to me only when I am watching/listening to something while playing Minetest. Later I tried a fresh world without any added mods and the same thing happened.

Same problem here: https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=9686

My solution, stick with 0.4.9 and cherry-pick some of the good stuff from 0.4.10 (like third person view)

Thanks. It's sad that we have to do that though.

Try compiling the current development version of Minetest and see what happens.

Inocudom wrote:Try compiling the current development version of Minetest and see what happens.

Latest git is much better for me, it's difficult to say if it is as smooth as it was but the jerkiness has calmed down at lot and my FPS is much more stable. At least 0.4.10-dev is playable again for me :D

btw, I also removed the farming mod, that seemed to help things a bit too.

Agreed, farming mod seems over-complicated now...

I switched yesterday from 0.4.9 to 0.4.10. (Client and Server)
I updated all my mods to current stable/released versions.

Also I edited the hell out of minetest.conf (Server and Client).
But 0.4.10 is even with ONLY ONE PLAYER unplayable!

I do not want to revert to 0.4.9, so:
WHICH CURRENT VERSION OF MIETEST IS A JOY TO PLAY? (No Lag or Jitter, as in Verision 0.4.10)

Is it sufficent to compile just the current stable-0.4 from github
or will only the current master from github be a joy to play like the last (and lost (pre 0.4.10)) versions?


Here is a list of the used mods on the server:


Thanks in advance!

I tested the current master (commit e5b4748bb4 (commit e5b4748bb44a12fd09a92f7d36986b4bda86e6bf)).
This seems to work fine (approx 1 hour playtime with reduced, eg. playable lag/jitter).

The Server lag reduced from 30-40 seconds (minetest 0.4.10) to 3-5 seconds (commit above).

Currently I migrate from sqlite3 to leveldb which may reduce the lag further.
(And if I'm not mistaken this will allow to run minetestmapper (https://github.com/minetest/minetestmapper)
while the minetest server is running.)

During the migration from sqlite3 to leveldb an lua error occured:

But this seems to have no negative impact to the world.

Now, above commit + leveldb, the server lag is around 0 - 1 second. :-)

(BTW, I built minetest with luajit v2.0.3, irrlicht v1.8.1, leveldb v1.15.0)

BlindBanana wrote:Now, above commit + leveldb, the server lag is around 0 - 1 second. :-)

Be sure to also try the Server performance settings.

Here's my version:


If you have the bandwidth, you can increase max_simultaneous_block_sends_server_total.

Mobs can create lag, too. But most important, as Calinou said above, is to have lower settings than default.