• Please make sure you are familiar with the forum rules. You can find them here: https://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/index.php?threads/forum-rules.2334636/

Potential Fixes For Loading Issues

Xienen

Tripwire Alumni and Break Blocks Owner
Mar 26, 2007
1,678
327
www.greatergoodgames.org
Before doing anything listed below, try suggestions on the top of this thread. We know that it may not sound relevant to your issue, but it continually seems to fix a variety of issues.

Alright guys, it seems that this is mostly an issue with Windows Vista and Windows 7, only 10-20% of the people with issues are on XP. This also applies to a wide range of machines(even on the latest and greatest machines available).

Basically, Windows Vista and 7 LOVE to throw things into the page file, especially when an Application takes more than 10% of the physical RAM available. I ran Windows 7 and was seeing 25-10,000 Page File hits per second while playing(with up to 25,000 during loading). This didn't cause much of an issue on either of my machines, because my main drives are not where Killing Floor is installed, and they are faster drives that are fully defragged.

For machines running Windows Vista or Windows 7(with 3+ GB of RAM), it seems that turning off the Page File safely fixes long loads.

For all other machines, especially those with 1-2 GB of RAM, it would be unsafe/unnecessary to turn off the Page File. The best that can be done is to use a good defrag tool(such as MyDefrag or Ultimate Defrag) to try make sure the page file and Killing Floor's files are not spread out across the hard disk.

Also, make sure that your Anti-Virus is not scanning every file Killing Floor loads before allowing Killing Floor to access the file. This can be done by adding an exception for the Killing Floor directory into your Anti-Virus.

Also, in an issue that appears to be similar, some players have also improved load times and game performance by disabling their second monitor.

I have been informed that running in Windowed Mode can also fix the long load time issues. Only a few people have reported this working, so please let us know if it does/doesn't work for you.

Please let us know which, if any, of these suggestions helps you. Also, if none of these help you, please tell us that, post your system specs, and let us know everything you've tried to do to fix the issue.
 
Windows 7 x64
4 gb RAM
8600gt


I remember a while back turning off the page file for reasons other than killing floor.(With 4gbs, it was just taking up hard drive space)

To test the loading issue, I enabled the windows default settings for page filing and found that loading maps for KF became painfully slow.(Solo or Multiplayer)

I can confirm that removing the page file for machines @ 4gbs or more helps tremendously.

Without page file: < 1 minute
With page file: > 2+ min(also seems jittery and stutters while in game)

Tutorial on how to disable it:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/...al-memory-change-or-disable-paging-file-size/
 
Upvote 0
Windows 7 x64 RC1
12gb DDR3
2.67ghz i7 Quad
1gb Radeon 4870

2 monitors @ 1680x1050, fullscreen on primary, at that resolution.

Turning off my pagefile is not an option as I regularly compress files with 7zip's highest settings and that takes more ram that I have for compressing.

I can, however, offer this:

Setting:

[Engine.GameEngine]
CacheSizeMegs=32

To

[Engine.GameEngine]
CacheSizeMegs=256

Really helps me a ton. It virtually got rid of my load times.

I encountered a strange issue:

If I crash killing floor, my ini files are hosed as far as the interface goes. If I delete them to recover, when I first launch the game ( 640x480, fullscreen by default ), the window bounces between both screens until either I crash, or Killing Floor crashes.

So there's definitely some trouble with multiple screens.
 
Upvote 0
post patch had pretravel/loading hang indefinitely (or long enough to have to kill the app and rejoin) after first map played, where all maps used to load within 10 seconds with precache turned off. upping cachesize to 256 sort of fixed it so that it would load eventually within 1-2 mins.

I don't have this problem loading maps in spectator, when not going through the lobby it loads just as fast as before.

still not ideal of course, and I have my pagefile set to the minimum 200mb for crash dumps, which needs to be on the system drive. not that I crash alot, just want to meet that minimum requirement, so I would not even consider turning it off altogether as long as windows needs that much space to make the smallest dump. specs:

xp-x86
core2 e6600 @ 3.2Ghz
3gb ddr3 (4gb total minus 1gb ramdisk)
896mb gtx260
single dvi monitor setup with kvm switch
 
Upvote 0
Lets hope that twi finds the cause for this issue as the issue was non existent apparently before 1008 so something must have changed the paging file usage. As disabling the paging file is generally never something thats recommended to do, but if a replication has been found already thats a giant leap into the correct direction.
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0
Cool, thanks for doing some investigatin':) I'm stuck on mobile broadband after Tiscali made a pigs ear of my land link, will test these when I go live again and report back

EDIT - this may sound dumb but would adding a -noprefetch switch to the executable turn off swapfile use for KF specifically?
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0
Cool, thanks for doing some investigatin':) I'm stuck on mobile broadband after Tiscali made a pigs ear of my land link, will test these when I go live again and report back

EDIT - this may sound dumb but would adding a -noprefetch switch to the executable turn off swapfile use for KF specifically?

In my experience that disables some of the caching for that program that Vista and Windows 7 does, it would not disable virtual memory.

For example, if you run Firefox a lot, the OS realizes this and anticipates you opening it in order to make a cold launch faster.

Doesn't mean you can't try it though.
 
Upvote 0
Cool, thanks for doing some investigatin':) I'm stuck on mobile broadband after Tiscali made a pigs ear of my land link, will test these when I go live again and report back

EDIT - this may sound dumb but would adding a -noprefetch switch to the executable turn off swapfile use for KF specifically?

Please let us know if you find this to help. I was searching for a way to locally turn off paging for a single application, but was unable to find anything in a few quick Google searches.
 
Upvote 0
Lets hope that twi finds the cause for this issue as the issue was non existent apparently before 1008 so something must have changed the paging file usage. As disabling the paging file is generally never something thats recommended to do, but if a replication has been found already thats a giant leap into the correct direction.

Unfortunately, Zets, upon further testing, we believe that its not the amount of memory that we're using that causes things to get thrown in the Page File and cause long loads, but it's actually the number of requests for memory that the Unreal Engine makes. We believe we have crossed some threshold in Windows Vista and Windows 7(probably 65536 requests). This is an Unreal Engine problem in the way it functions at its core, which we may not be able to simply fix without rewriting the engine. Normally, any application looking to utilize a large chunk of memory would combine all similar requests into a single request in order to improve performance, which is probably how it's done in more modern engines. With this type of intelligent single request system, on top of being faster itself, it also never maxes out the number of requests allowed before the Operating System says "Enough! Use the Page File for future requests!"

This is our current understanding of what's happening, but we are continuing to look into any possible fixes that we may implement ourselves to resolve this issue.
 
Upvote 0
Cool, thanks for doing some investigatin':) I'm stuck on mobile broadband after Tiscali made a pigs ear of my land link, will test these when I go live again and report back

EDIT - this may sound dumb but would adding a -noprefetch switch to the executable turn off swapfile use for KF specifically?

I have attempted the switch with the page filing enabled, it still causes the load time per map to exceed 2 minutes in some cases.

As soon as I shut off page file, back to under a minute.
 
Upvote 0
Yes, he has similar hardware to mine. I retested the method on my machine just to make sure and it definitely works for him but not me.

Same gfx card, cpu, and ram, the motherboard is the only difference.

Also, he has two of my gfx cards (8600gts) running in sli, but I don't see the connection.


However, our hard drives are different along with his nvidia chipset vs my intel one.
 
Upvote 0