Minetest Is Working The CPU Too Hard These Days

[Sokomine]

There are issues with speed. VanessaEs spawn on her survival server still kills my fps. According to VanessaE, it's related to the signs, and a better GPU doesn't really help as much as might be expected.

Figuring out which mods have trouble and cause fps drops may help in order to find out bottlenecks not only in the mods but also in the engine. A reproducable setup (i.e. minetest_game + seed 12345 might help in order to compare performance better.

[4aiman]

+1 Rubenwardy
+100 Sokomine

I have tried a few versions of Minetest and am having the same issue. I have a quad core processor and 6 gigs of ram. I am running Ubuntu Gnome 14.10. I have the cpu ram and temp stats in the top bar. Without minetest running and doing outer things such as watching videos or surfing the web or even using Gimp the cpu seems fine and the ram andd temp stays low. When I play Minetest it starts out fine but gradually increases until the ram is at 95 - 100%. The cpu doesn't go too high but the temp increases by 50%. The frame rate drops to 3 - 5 fps.
I tried different video drivers but no change. I disabled all apps and features I could and no change.
Once I shut down Minetest the ram drops down to around 12 - 14 %. When I start Minetest up again it gradually goes up again.
Hope this helps. If you need more info let me know.

Reports like this make me wonder...
My PC's HW report: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8bt0bkl8543zyy9/report.txt?dl=0
Taskman screenie:

*Note that minetest is my server up and running, freeminer - a client (I play with it to use Russian in chat), connected to 127.0.0.1.
Report was taken while both were running.
Do I hear any noise? Nope. Same as w/o minetest.
Oh, I have 4Gb of RAM. The rest in the report.
What I'm doing wrong?

My Acer Aspire One, however, eats up to 80% of CPU and about 800Mb of RAM.
Does the CPU fan start to spin faster? Of course. FPS? 15-40 with Magichet launched from the 'Server' tab. Temperature? Up to 45 (if it 'stands' on a 'warm' blanket or a pillow) - not that critical in such circumstances. But it has an Intel Atom CPU of 1.6GHz x 2, 1Gb of DDR1 RAM and an integrated i945 graphics adapter! It's a miracle it runs minetest, have 5-6 opened tabs in Iceweasel and runs pidgin as well.
Should I leave MT only - only about 60% of CPU is consumed. I think that's normal.
Minecraft can't really go near this at all.

This isn't a laughing matter, guys. In fact, this is very, very, very serious. I should also mention that every issue that affects Minetest affects Freeminer as well if proller doesn't make commits that fix such issues.

No, you are not. We're yet to see the real data taken while your PC runs MT with a <paste the subgame name you've played here>.
See that report above? It proves I can launch 2 more clients w/o any troubles.


But you know, people, I've an idea:
what if it's a problem with 4-cored AMD CPUs? E.g. Specific to that type of CPUs?
I'm aware of at least 2 more ppl who have 4cored AMD and have performance issues.

PS: I'm not yelling, I'm trying to keep message shorter vertically ;)

Offtopic:

4Aiman: You kinda forgot the best one:
4: "Here's this item that has no bearing on Minetest and that maybe 6 people will use (if we're lucky), let's spend lots of time and effort to implement it/what do you think?"

This is also the best bug thread ever.

EDIT: typo

Didn't get it at all... Sorry. Could you explain?

[Don]

Sorry I did not post my specs. I am using a Lenovo z575

Processor
AMD A8-3500M APU with Radeon HD 6620G Graphics × 4

I am using the AMD fglrx-updates driver
After the latest update to the os the problem seems to have disappeared. I am not sure what updated that fixed it but I have not had the problems in 2 days now.

I will let you know if I have anymore issues.

[Inocudom]

Sorry I did not post my specs. I am using a Lenovo z575

Processor
AMD A8-3500M APU with Radeon HD 6620G Graphics × 4

I am using the AMD fglrx-updates driver
After the latest update to the os the problem seems to have disappeared. I am not sure what updated that fixed it but I have not had the problems in 2 days now.

I will let you know if I have anymore issues.

I am not sure how that could be the case. But, as you said, please keep us informed.

You know, the way this topic is going is starting to remind me of the following words of vast wisdom:
http://youtu.be/_U-Pr2NeJy8?t=47m55s

I checked my CPU while playing 11 different sub-games (#2 and #12 are the same one, but #12 involves many mods:)
https://mediacru.sh/XaNV_aDfUBu-
The full list of the sub-games is shown below:
#1-minetest_game (mapgenv6)
#2-carbone (mapgenv6)
#3-minimal_development_test (mapgenv6)
#4-overgen_game (custom)
#5-voxelgarden (mapgenv5)
#6-dreambuilder (mapgenv6)
#7-magichet (mapgenv5)
#8-riventest (mapgenv6)
#9-m13game (mapgenv6)
#10-avatar (mapgenv6)
#11-big_freaking_dig (mapgenv5)
#12-carbone (with many mods alongside it) (mapgenv5)

[4aiman]

Why does it look like you're using only 256 colours? O_o
I've checked the image and it's full RGB w/o palette or color reduce.
So, why?
Was it intentional or you use 8bit colour settings? If so, cease.
Did you try to update your drivers?
Did you try to have another TP (or none at all) an disable some fancy graphics options?
It's very strange how your CPUs and RAM experience harder times running Minetest_game than running Magichet...
So, first of all, sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade.
*Note: I don't care what anyone says about aptitude - it gives me less control and suggests deleting half of my system every time. 'cause "there are unused KDE libs", - it says. I NEED them for apps development, you, stupid bastard :)

Also, Mint didn't perform well for me. That's why I'm on debian+xfce - runs well on every my device.

[ExeterDad]

Also, Mint didn't perform well for me. That's why I'm on debian+xfce - runs well on every my device.

Would that be SolydX? Sweet fast combo IMO

[4aiman]

Would that be SolydX? Sweet fast combo IMO

Nope, that would be a distro, prepared with love for myself and by myself. Made it within VBox then cloned onto real HW.
The first to come to be sid was Acer Aspire One (AFTER the cloning process).
The last was my primary PC's turn (the one the report came from).
They both diverged from each other now, the first one being a more 'business' thing and the second one a more 'media' thing. (Although it IS possible to run KDEnLive on Acer, KDE libs were too much for it to handle with a tolerable speed.)


Anyway...
I'm not implying anything, but why didn't Inocudom show the process list?
Now I believe he has issues, but don't believe those are connected with MT. (Sorry for being too nihilistic.)

A screen shot of Magichet running within dev Minetest (NOT the latest, actually).

+ Spoiler

As one can see - CPU has been eaten by MT, but that's only half true :)
Of course, 11FPS is not quite playable, but I've spawned, like, 40 skeletons in the area (in addition to those 20 which has spawned on their own).
PC can't handle MT anymore with that amount of entities, but bear in mind, that this one is not much better than Acer Aspire One (2x2GHz, 2Gb DDR2 RAM, i945 IGA).
Yet, RAM and CPU consumption by MT itself was more than normal.
Should I close Iceweasel, Audacious, Pidginm Geany, Libre Office Writer and some unused ATM terminal windows, I would get this:

+ Spoiler

Yay! 27 FPS and 54% CPU time.
That IS playable.

In both cases CPU fan did NOT try to make PC into the air ;)

^ Just some info to think about and consider looking somewhere else.

[twoelk]

I have wondered, playing with the Minetest win releases of the past week and having just recently updated Firefox, whether Minetest is fighting with the browser for resources. This seems to have changed to the worse in the last weeks but then again Firefox is freezing my home-pc a lot more with media problems than before, most notably flash, so it might rather be browser related. What has happened more often recently is that the Minetest window looses focus and the mouse wanders off.

[Don]

Update.
The issue still exists.
I have been playing for a couple hours and the memory climbed up to 96%. 68% of that was minetest.
After closing out of miinetest the mem dropped to 20% which is mostly gnome shell.
I only had minetest open and htop running in terminal.
Temperature does not seem to be high like before.
Minetest was using up to 166% of cpu. It seemed to be using all 4 cores so average % wasn't too bad.

I was playing on Minetestville server. The server is a dual core with 2 gigs ram. It seems to run fine. Have had no downtime except backups.

[4aiman]

Firefox+flash become worse on Linux too. Instead of freezing my PC it crashes. But again, that was my intentional setup to not let flash eat-up all my RAM.
My friends already tried to persuade me to abandon FF at all...

But for me MT doesn't loose focus. Sometimes the opposite - it won't let me to move my mouse away if there's no open formspec and windows have transparency (an effect of a composite WM).
Note, that I'm using XFCE with any Linux-flavoured OS I have installed.

@Don that IS disturbing... Why do some ppl have that issues and some do not?..
I know, my home server isn't that popular and there're only 1-4 players most of the time, but there were days when MT ran for 3 days while OS uptime was near 2 weeks and still - 1 GB limit was never reached.
How about using a debug build and supplying the output? It just might help. Or not. It depends...

Actually, I DO have the access to a server with AMD quad-cored CPU... Might be able to test MT on that thing. But I doubt it'll fail - it costs almost $1500.
I'll report if I would be able to do it.

PS: It seems I talk to much... But I've supplied a lot of info too - helpful, I hope :)

[Inocudom]

Well, I updated the graphics driver for my GPU and Minetest is quieter now. The CPU can still get noisy sometimes, but things have improved. I forget a certain post I made all too often:

Well, at least we all know now why the Just Test Server is the way it is. I humble myself before this man's great wisdom and ask for forgiveness of my sins in this community. I am no better than anybody else, for I am made of meat (flesh) just like everybody else, and I can perish just as easily as everybody else. I am not a god, so I have absolutely no right to act like one, even though I pretty much have in the past. Pride is the path to death, but humility is the path to life.

[4aiman]

Well, I updated the graphics driver for my GPU and Minetest is quieter now. The CPU can still get noisy sometimes, but things have improved. I forget a certain post I made all too often:

Well, at least we all know now why the Just Test Server is the way it is. I humble myself before this man's great wisdom and ask for forgiveness of my sins in this community. I am no better than anybody else, for I am made of meat (flesh) just like everybody else, and I can perish just as easily as everybody else. I am not a god, so I have absolutely no right to act like one, even though I pretty much have in the past. Pride is the path to death, but humility is the path to life.

That's why I've said that ... you're a troll. Do you want to mock anyone with that? :)

[Zeno]

Could always fit the CPU with a silencer

[Calinou]

Could always fit the CPU with a silencer

This doesn't solve battery life and heat issues…

[ArguablySane]

I've also recently been experiencing severe lag in minetest.

OS: Ubuntu Linux 14.04
CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz × 4
RAM: 8 GB
GPU: GeForce GTX 560 Ti/PCIe/SSE2 using NVidia binary driver version 331.113 (recommended)

Minetest: 0.4.10-dev

Prior to updating to the latest version I was consistently getting very smooth performance and a framerate of 60 fps even with a render distance of 250. With the latest version, using the same settings and worldgen I get around 15 fps. I've confirmed it's definitely a rendering issue because the problem completely disappears when I look at the sky, and lowering my rendering distance helps a lot.

I've tried playing around with the settings a bit, and the only improvement I've managed to make is disabling shaders. That doesn't quite restore my framerate to 60 fps, but it was at least a factor of two improvement.
Disabling all the other non-shader settings had absolutely no effect.

Oddly, despite being a graphics issue it doesn't seem to be working my GPU too hard. I don't hear the fan spin up like I do on other graphics-heavy games. My CPU usage does spike quite high though.

EDIT: The problem seems to have solved itself after I restarted my computer. It was probably caused by some other piece of software getting updated or something.