3. Is the game running slow?

Is the game running slow?


  • Hi,

    I just tried screep today and it seems to me that the world is running much more slowly (2x) than expected. We only get a tick every 2-2.5s now. For example base on the novice protection ticks and itme, we should get about a tick per second.

    Is this normal or just a temporary issue? Given the subscription price, devs should not have issue paying for more hardware. OVH cost about 15-20$ per high performance cores, top level players can use at most 300ms per tick so 30% if a tick is 1s of one cpu and I expect most player to have much much less cpu available. There is some shared cost obviously for the redis and mongo db instances + overhead per player.

    Anyway game is quite interesting keep up the good work.

  • Culture

    The normal tick speed has always been around 2.5 seconds.

    About costs, you're forgetting the development time, steam markups, advertising and lots of other small things.

    Tick speeds this week have been averaging around 2.2 seconds, so it's been faster this week compared to the pre-steamrelease phase.

    Hope you enjoy the game!

  • Culture

    Top level players can average 300ms but can burst up to 500ms (as can *anyone* using their bucket).

    I don't think the issue can easily be solved by throwing more money and servers at it. Once things are open source we'll all get an opportunity to help optimize.


  • And now we are at 4.1 sec avg() ... 😞 Way too slow in order to really enjoy watching ... plus the Steam client wrapper thing is lagging so hard ... maybe we can have a dedicated client written in C++ or something ... not like a few creeps should be a problem to handle if you check out RimWorld or Factorio ...

  • Culture

    The average of 4 seconds per tick is currently the max upper limit. Artem told us (can’t find the post anymore) that he strives to keep the tick speed under 4 seconds.

    It’s currently at 3.97 seconds average ( http://status.screeps.com/ ). If it gets higher they will probably throw more servers at it.

    On a side note:
    They’re also working hard on optimizing the engine as seen here: http://i.imgur.com/ias9xCc.png, gotten from https://github.com/screeps/engine branches.

    They’re aware the game is currently not running as fast as it could, and working on optimizing this.


  • 4*50/60 =  3,3 minutes to cross a single room is kind of unacceptable. What is the bottleneck? The cpu load? The mongoDB backend?

    The whole game should really mostly scale linearly as there are little to no dependencies to care about between rooms, etc. ... so yes, it should scale horizontally quite well. The initial poster is more than right ... for 10Eur/month I can get a dedicated AWS instance and not even the smallest one ... 😞

    I just want 2sec ticks back ... badly.


  • I just bought a game and I am terrified! It's one month later and right now tick is about 5 sec.