Bay 12 Games Forum

I know that framerate is the be-all-end-all of a working fort, and I thought I was safe from having it crash on me since I'm running a fairly modern computer.  It's not liquid cooled but it's a few magnitudes more powerful than the common laptop.  During my current fort though, which I'm so proud about because it's actually survived, my FPS has started jittering.  I get ~35 FPS normally, which is fine for me since I can leave my dorfs to run about without too much oversight, but then it started to take breaks on me.  My FPS will run regular for a while, and then stop entirely for about a second or two, then perform about 30 steps before it freezes again.  It's a rough freeze too, because the window will include (Not Responding) at the top and the graphics freeze, like that little graphic for when two items are atop each other and they flash one object then another?  That will stop as well.

I'm on a 5x5 embark, with a river on one side, and 60 dwarves, very few animals and most of them chained or caged.  GFPS is always identical to the FPS, I don't have any running water aside from the river.  I ran some water to fill me well reservoir, but the floodgates have closed since then.  This is un-modified, except that I made monkeys into [PET] after the issues started.

Am I doing something wrong, does this happen at random times on random forts, or is the coding a little sloppy for some things?  Oh also, I haven't broken into any of the cavern layers yet.