I just happen to have implemented a couple of improvements to the UI yesterday, including some significant performance boosts on the client and server side. I'm playing a 800 star system map, with 20 AIs. With the changes, to me, the UI still feels snappy after 250 turns. This includes changing my rather long build queue, selecting other systems, opening the production screen and selecting fleets. I can see about half of the universe.
Only the turn change still freezes the UI for two or three seconds - much shorter than before. On these occasions sometimes the sounds stops briefly.
If you can compile from source you can try my changes at
https://github.com/OlafPettersson/freeo ... nSidePanel until i come around to advertise some of the UI changes I made and properly prepare a pull request.
If you can't compile from source, you might want to try to:
- Keep your production queue as short as possible. In vanilla FreeOrion 0.4.8 the production queue becomes rather slow when it becomes longer. The production queue is recalculated every time you select a system, even when the production screen is not open.
- Enable binary serialization. I believe you need to restart FreeOrion for this config change to take effect.
- Alternativly, disable zlib-xml compression. This compression methods works very badly with large systems. It tries to serialize everything to memory first, but always fails after some seconds, because it can't allocate a continuous block of memory of the size required. It then fallbacks to binary serialization, taking another couple of seconds to complete. Again, restart FreeOrion to make this config change take effect.
- Increase the number of turns when an autosave is made. I play with 5 turns.
If you want to try to compile my changes, make sure to have at least one savegame with non-zlib XML at hand. Your newly compiled version will most probably not be able to load the binary savegames of vanilla 0.4.8.