Problems with Slow Mafia

Sometime after my erroneous attempt at creating a custom DailyDeed my Mafia turned into something as slow as a snail stuck in syrup. Would a strange/botched preference be able to do that?
If not does anyone have any idea what could have happened?

The slowness seems to come only when trying to adventure and when trying to invoke scripts (so auto adventuring is really slow due to being both of those...). When a script gets invoked it runs just fine, but the call to start it appears to take an insane amount of time (compared to how it normally is).

If you turn on debug logging before calling a script or auto-adventuring, does anything strange appear that didn't appear before?

hum...

can't think of anything off the top of my head that would be custom-deed related. Maybe related to the MRU thing which went in at around the same time?

slyz said:

If you turn on debug logging before calling a script or auto-adventuring, does anything strange appear that didn't appear before?

Click to expand...

I decided to run Ascend.ash (I was going to call farm.ash but clicked on the wrong one...) and got the following debug log. Also attached is one for when I logged in (also rather slow due to the presence (or so it seems to me) of UR and a login-script. They are both zipped since they are rather large (8 and 12MB respectively).

I have no idea what should be there so...

Edit: Removed those as I don't think they'll say anything anyway...

Attached two new files instead. On from my old installation (with the preference folder cleared so it created a new one) and one from a fresh installation of Mafia. The Fresh installation is quick as it used to be, the old one is still as sluggish (this is on two different computers now by the way so it is most likely not something to do with the system as it is reproducible withthe same installation on 2 computers (USB-stick)).

The only difference in a call to my test-script (which as you can see doesn't do much). I added in a little gametime_to_int() run and teh exceution is in both cases 0 ms however when run like this:

It takes 4094ms on the "slow" installation but on the "new" installation that same call takes 0 ms.
I've got no idea what is causing this as deleting the preference-folder makes no difference, but a new installation does.

Hmm... Copying every folder one by one to the new installation (on the harddrive rather than on the USB-stick) leads to no increase in loading speed (still 0, or soemtimes 16ms). It thus appears like there is something odd going on with the stick...
I'll runmy turns from the "new" installation for now and make sure I copy everything back when I log out

Can't install dropbox instead of using a stick?

Installing worked fine (even though it did complain about not having admin rights) but getting it through the proxy did not work at first. It worked when I set it to use a username and password which for some reason Mafia does not need (now I need to remember to change that password every 5 weeks...).

I'll try that out and see how it goes.

Are you suggesting that you needed to configure mafia to work with dropbox as a proxy server? That is not the way to use dropbox. If I did not misunderstand you, please read this.

No, I needed to configure Dropbox to use a proxy server to connect to the net since the connection at work goes through a proxy (while the one at home doesn't). Mafia does this too, but for whatever reason I do not need to enter a username and password for that while Dropbox required me to do this before I got through the proxy server (since I have to change my password every 5 weeks, remembering to change it somewhere else as well will be annoying...).

Ah, that's why you were mentioning mafia in conjunction with dropbox and a proxy server. That's quite annoying. I can see why you might prefer to use a flashdrive.

Things ran unusually slow for me yesterday. Since I have yet to try anything with the New and Improved Daily Deeds I figured I'd dig. As usually happens, with one exception, as soon as I was set up to profile, the problem either went away or was obscured by the overhead of the profiler. Initial results pointed to the Relay Browser but I was not able to refine that. When I didn't open the relay browser the slowdown did not occur and approximately 20% of the cpu time used was in reading files. However when I tried again, with the relay browser open the speed was as expected.

So no hard data. Since I/O to flash devices is slower than I/O to a disk that might be a possibility although somewhat unlikely if you have been using the flash drive for a while. The relay browser is perhaps implicated enough to warrant further investigation. There was no evidence that the Daily Deeds or MRU updates were contributing noticeably to runtime but in this case the absence of evidence does not necessarily absolve them ;-)