Topic

Game Performance Question

Does anyone have any tips for increasing the performance of the game and/or Flash? I notice the longer I play, the slower the game seems to get... I am usually able to troubleshoot this kind of stuff by myself but nothing I try seems to really work. I can close the browser and reload the game and that seems to help for awhile but a more permanent solution would be awesome. I am running Windows 7 64-bit and using the latest Firefox. Thanks!

Posted 14 months ago by Ryft Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • Wow! I was just going to post a link to the FAQ for this, but it looks like we don't have anything in the FAQ — that will get rectified!

    The biggest piece of advice is: use a different browser for Glitch than you are using for everything else. If the game has to compete for resources with a couple of tabs with Youtube videos, some typical pages with animated ads, your webmail client, javascript-heavy sites like Facebook or Google Docs and all of that, it will definitely run slower.

    So, in your case, if FF is covering your daily browser needs, try running Glitch in Chrome, IE or Safari (we don't really have a favorite in general: even with the same OS and browser version, some run better and worse in a totally mysterious way for different people).

    We are monitoring framerate, memory usage, etc., and working on performance improvements continuously. We are also constantly adding new features and content so it is often a "two steps forward, one step back" kind of thing. But, we'll get there!
    Posted 14 months ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks for the suggestion! I do use multiple tabs for checking forums, wiki, etc and I use an adblocking extension to help lower memory usage... it seems like a common thing with Flash that it's not very memory friendly but it's nice to hear you are working on enhancing the performance. =)
    Posted 14 months ago by Ryft Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @ stoot barfield: Do you still prefer us to run the debug version of Flash Player?
    Posted 14 months ago by BarryW Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I notice the same thing. The first screen I load in runs smooth as butter, but I think it's the more people I see, the slower it gets. Firefox it was harder to reload to refresh the performance, but Chrome makes a quicker reload. I tend to reload once an hour to clear out whatever is bogging me down, although I have a crappy computer, so that might have something to do with it.
    Posted 14 months ago by Zu Subscriber! | Permalink
  • In addition to what Stoot has said I would recommend running an adblocker in your browsers to cut down on the number of flash instances.

    I'm on a Mac so I don't know if you have this option on Windows, but I have a little application that sits in my menu bar and when I click it, it kills flash outright. It seems to work better than simply reloading the page. I had to use it every hour or so depending on how much of Ur I visit.
    Posted 14 months ago by Skwid Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I noticed that after running Glitch for awhile, I will run my cleaning application and Firefox will have an insane amount of temporary files... I don't remember exactly how many it was but I will check next time I run it.
    Posted 14 months ago by Ryft Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I do think Glitch tends to cache images for everything you see (players, items, objects, backgrounds), but I don't think that should affect performance very much.

    What does seem to be a problem is that Glitch is a massive CPU hog. It's constantly pushing my CPU to the limit (both cores, even), which is strange since the game isn't too overly technical. It's not like it has to calculate realistic physics or particle effects.

    That could just be Flash Player being Flash Player, though.
    Posted 14 months ago by xylotism Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Re: Cache Clearing - http://www.glitch.com/forum/general/8231/#reply-88112

    stoot said: 
    "clearing cache probably won't hurt performance over the long term but it will mean that the browser has to download more stuff so it'll be slower at first AND IT WILL NOT IMPROVE THE PERFORMANCE OF THE GAME. I don't know where this idea came from, but it is often repeated by players and we definitely do not recommend it."
    Posted 14 months ago by Millie Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It's Flash Player being Flash Player though. Flash 11 is supposed to fix some of the problems (it comes in 64 bit too), but Glitch is still Flash 10 only, but the developer who handles those issues has been checking things out.
    Posted 14 months ago by Fokian Fool Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Glitch works with flash 11. And I'm not sure how running the game in a different browser would help since your computer is going to have to allocate the resources anyway. Typically, chrome has the best performance with in browser games.
    Posted 14 months ago by argorn5757 Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Glitch does run under Flash 11 (I'm a Flash beta tester too :D ), but the client is still written towards Flash 10. Flash 11 is simply backwards compatible. But the extra memory management features of Flash 10 aren't being taken advantage of yet by the game. There simply isn't the market penetration to justify the time and expense of updating the client...yet. But the game no longer gives me the message "That's some cutting edge Flash there" anymore so that's a good sign.
    Posted 14 months ago by Fokian Fool Subscriber! | Permalink