I've been working on a massive (for me, at least) mod pack for my nephews and nieces. I've never put together this many mods before -- it's gotten close to 80 -- and it's been going a lot smoother than I expected.
Part of the reason I stick to at most a dozen mods is that in my experience, you throw more than that together and it's errors all the way down. Guess Forge and some modern methodology has led to a much more stable playground where the mods tend to get along.
That said, I just threw in a few more mods, and I'm having lag. And I want to track down which specific mod is doing this so I can drop it. Or if it's a combination where I have to pick one mod or the other, I'd like to know (I'd hate to throw out a perfectly serviceable mod because a mod I care about less was interfering with it).
Also, in hopes of better self-sufficiency in the future, I'd like to know how to track down this kind of problem in my own, short of semi-randomly tossing mods in and out of the build to see which combinations have the least lag.
I have a fairly stable build with the following set, so far:
Hope I got all those links right. Some mods have similar names to others, a few haven't updated their main page to reflect the latest build, and some of them got updated by other people, so it's a bit hard to keep track.
Anyway, then I added in some extras, pulled a couple that were throwing errors (including MC+ Lumber), and ended up with this extra list here:
Then the lag started. So I decided to narrow it down by making a build with all the new ones and very few of the old ones (Biomes o' Plenty is still in there because it's one of the most basic elements of my mod build, so I need to get to a stable state with it included). So here's my current build, which is having lag stutters, especially with the movement of animals (e.g. leading chickens around) and sometimes with my ability to move my view as well:
MC+ BattleHearts and FirePit
Better Rain
Biomes o' Plenty
CaveControl
Custom Ore Gen
Improving Minecraft
Primitive Mobs
TooMuchLoot
Now, I've used Custom Ore Gen before and I love it. I trust BoP, despite minor instabilities here or there. And Improving Minecraft didn't seem to have an effect on the larger build. So unless one of them is interacting badly, or Custom Ore Gen has started being laggier than I remember, that leaves Primitive Mobs, Cave Control, Too Much Loot, Better Rain, and the MC+ mods.
I could just make five builds, each one lacking one of the suspects, and see if only one of them lags. But I thought I'd ask if there's a better way to do this, especially if it turns out that more than one of the builds lags, perhaps because of interaction, or if I find a set that works fine in this tinier set but causes lag once I reintroduce them to the bigger set.
So please help me learn a more efficient method, if one exists. Then I can weave the rest of them back into my major build and start figuring out what other problems might need solving before I unveil this monstrosity for the kids this coming weekend.
Thanks in advance!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
Well, if you use F3 and the graph feature you can narrow down what part of minecraft is causing the most lag (if interface was giving the most lag, you might expect a mod that drastically overhauls the interface would be causing some lag).
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
It's important to know if you're getting lag when you're exploring (and thus generating) new chunks, or if you're getting the lag even when you're in a well-established area.
In my experience, Biomes O' Plenty causes a lot visible stuttering while generating new chunks. The nature of their biome generation is just more CPU-intensive than vanilla. Any of your other worldgen mods could also be at fault. Mods like Battle Towers will cause an occasional (but severe) one-time hit each time a tower is generated. If you have any mods that generate really big trees (like Natura Redwoods or Twilight Forest big oaks), I find that each generated tree is devastating.
If it's not a worldgen issue, then I have no specific advice. I'm not familiar with all the mods in your list. The above posts are a good start.
Also, in hopes of better self-sufficiency in the future, I'd like to know how to track down this kind of problem in my own, short of semi-randomly tossing mods in and out of the build to see which combinations have the least lag.
....
I could just make five builds, each one lacking one of the suspects, and see if only one of them lags. But I thought I'd ask if there's a better way to do this, especially if it turns out that more than one of the builds lags, perhaps because of interaction, or if I find a set that works fine in this tinier set but causes lag once I reintroduce them to the bigger set.
So please help me learn a more efficient method, if one exists. Then I can weave the rest of them back into my major build and start figuring out what other problems might need solving before I unveil this monstrosity for the kids this coming weekend.
It's going to be mostly trial and error, I'm afraid. At least the process can be sped up with a binary search approach - take away half the mods, see if problem occurs. If so, divide in half. If not, swap in the other half. Repeat.
This is not foolproof, though, as mod interactions sometimes depend on more than two at a time. I had a 3-way incompatibility, once... It's also not foolproof because the lag may even be something as frustrating as Minecraft running out of free memory and frequently needing to run Java's "garbage collection" process, in which case it might go away if you remove a few of any of the major mods, with no specific ones to blame. If your hardware has enough RAM, and if your OS and your Java version are 64-bit, and if you haven't already done so, allocating more memory to Minecraft is one theoretical solution. Using Optifine and reducing the view distance also help me with stuttery performance problems on my aging laptop. So does simply rebooting my computer, at times.
Otherwise, if you're lucky, you can make some educated guessing, depending what the problem is. A crash when you look in a specific chest probably wouldn't be caused by Better Rain, for example. Unfortunately a lag problem is very unspecific unless there ends up being some common situation, eg. always in a particular biome or always when a particular animal is present or always when traveling, etc.
What sort of messages should I be looking for? Just the "did the time change? having trouble keeping up" ones?
As was mentioned, watch how often you get the trouble keeping up messages. Are you entering a new area when you do, are you turning on something or flying around. Are you trying to access some container etc? Keep an eye on when it happens.
Also, are you getting it once in a while or do you get spam of just numbers in miliseconds of what the lag is? Are you getting any STDERR messages?
In addition, turn on Fn+F3 and keep an eye on some of the numbers. Watch for sudden FPS changes, memory loaded, chunks loaded etc.
If the log gives you nothing useful, you'll probably have to start playing with turning off mods or adjusting your settings in order to find out where the issue is.
Part of the reason I stick to at most a dozen mods is that in my experience, you throw more than that together and it's errors all the way down. Guess Forge and some modern methodology has led to a much more stable playground where the mods tend to get along.
That said, I just threw in a few more mods, and I'm having lag. And I want to track down which specific mod is doing this so I can drop it. Or if it's a combination where I have to pick one mod or the other, I'd like to know (I'd hate to throw out a perfectly serviceable mod because a mod I care about less was interfering with it).
Also, in hopes of better self-sufficiency in the future, I'd like to know how to track down this kind of problem in my own, short of semi-randomly tossing mods in and out of the build to see which combinations have the least lag.
I have a fairly stable build with the following set, so far:
Anyway, then I added in some extras, pulled a couple that were throwing errors (including MC+ Lumber), and ended up with this extra list here:
Now, I've used Custom Ore Gen before and I love it. I trust BoP, despite minor instabilities here or there. And Improving Minecraft didn't seem to have an effect on the larger build. So unless one of them is interacting badly, or Custom Ore Gen has started being laggier than I remember, that leaves Primitive Mobs, Cave Control, Too Much Loot, Better Rain, and the MC+ mods.
I could just make five builds, each one lacking one of the suspects, and see if only one of them lags. But I thought I'd ask if there's a better way to do this, especially if it turns out that more than one of the builds lags, perhaps because of interaction, or if I find a set that works fine in this tinier set but causes lag once I reintroduce them to the bigger set.
So please help me learn a more efficient method, if one exists. Then I can weave the rest of them back into my major build and start figuring out what other problems might need solving before I unveil this monstrosity for the kids this coming weekend.
Thanks in advance!
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
What sort of messages should I be looking for? Just the "did the time change? having trouble keeping up" ones?
I haven't been really keeping an eye on the log. Only when it crashes. Should probably do that.
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
In my experience, Biomes O' Plenty causes a lot visible stuttering while generating new chunks. The nature of their biome generation is just more CPU-intensive than vanilla. Any of your other worldgen mods could also be at fault. Mods like Battle Towers will cause an occasional (but severe) one-time hit each time a tower is generated. If you have any mods that generate really big trees (like Natura Redwoods or Twilight Forest big oaks), I find that each generated tree is devastating.
If it's not a worldgen issue, then I have no specific advice. I'm not familiar with all the mods in your list. The above posts are a good start.
Mods I Develop: Garden Stuff -- Storage Drawers -- Hunger Strike
Tools I Develop: NBTExplorer -- Substrate
It's going to be mostly trial and error, I'm afraid. At least the process can be sped up with a binary search approach - take away half the mods, see if problem occurs. If so, divide in half. If not, swap in the other half. Repeat.
This is not foolproof, though, as mod interactions sometimes depend on more than two at a time. I had a 3-way incompatibility, once... It's also not foolproof because the lag may even be something as frustrating as Minecraft running out of free memory and frequently needing to run Java's "garbage collection" process, in which case it might go away if you remove a few of any of the major mods, with no specific ones to blame. If your hardware has enough RAM, and if your OS and your Java version are 64-bit, and if you haven't already done so, allocating more memory to Minecraft is one theoretical solution. Using Optifine and reducing the view distance also help me with stuttery performance problems on my aging laptop. So does simply rebooting my computer, at times.
Otherwise, if you're lucky, you can make some educated guessing, depending what the problem is. A crash when you look in a specific chest probably wouldn't be caused by Better Rain, for example. Unfortunately a lag problem is very unspecific unless there ends up being some common situation, eg. always in a particular biome or always when a particular animal is present or always when traveling, etc.
As was mentioned, watch how often you get the trouble keeping up messages. Are you entering a new area when you do, are you turning on something or flying around. Are you trying to access some container etc? Keep an eye on when it happens.
Also, are you getting it once in a while or do you get spam of just numbers in miliseconds of what the lag is? Are you getting any STDERR messages?
In addition, turn on Fn+F3 and keep an eye on some of the numbers. Watch for sudden FPS changes, memory loaded, chunks loaded etc.
If the log gives you nothing useful, you'll probably have to start playing with turning off mods or adjusting your settings in order to find out where the issue is.