Is there a guide anywhere for performance tuning of Sins, what the bottlenecks are likely to be, and what can be done about them?
For example, this is kind of an extreme case, but today I was hosting a game with 5 human players vs 5 hard AIs on the large single-star random map (58 planets I think). About 4 hours in, we've all go huge fleets, tons of planets, and a whole lot of combat going on. Not surprisingly, the game begins to lag. Every minute or so, there would be a 5-10 second hang, and then the game would resume. Seems like a resync lag, rather than a classic UDP lag (meaning that things would freeze and resume from the spot they froze at, rather than popping to a new location as if time had been passing in game during the hang). It's also worth noting that all people playing this experienced the hangs and starts simultaneously.
We tried turning off all our graphics options (I know, that's video/framerate, but it's the easiest thing to do), and that didn't help noticeably. Other applications on all machines were turned off, and we even rebooted all machines to clear out leaked memory. Again no performance gain. Memory usage was about a gig on all hosts, and cpu was high but not pegged (but these are multi-processor hosts... is Sins single threaded?)
Are there any thoughts or suggestions on ways to tune the game to stop these hangs, and is there someone knowledgeable on how Sins functions internally who can make a suggestion on what's the bounding factor? Admittedly, we were pushing the game to the maximum scenario it's written to do, but it's something we'll probably do again in the future.
Thanks!