Suddenly, I've developed a slowdown issue.

[Elegnaim 0]

Speccies:

Rush Hour

P4 3GHz

1 Gig of ram. 2 gig pagefile.

Uh, windows XP. I probably have SP2 and I most certainly have the .NET Framework.

I don't believe I have any viruses.

ATI Radeon X600.

Okay, this is PROBABLY related to something I've downloaded (or, perhaps, having downloaded too much?) Game worked fine up until... well, when SimTropolis came back up from its downtime, and I went on a downloading binge. Basically, SC4 is incredibly slow. Now, I know it tends to get slow with big cities. But, er, this is slow with empty city-scapes. I'm half suspecting that, perhaps, it's because I put a ton of trees in the world, but I've done various things to get RID of the trees, and... they don't help at all.

Basically, my initial thought was something with the Network Addon Mod. However, the pathfinding patches don't seem to be related -- I've tried several and without. The other potential culprit, I figured, was that mod that changes the, er, speed buttons to have different speed settings. I really doubt this, because I've been using this for a LONG while. Anyway, I'm just gonna post a list of recent BATs and whatnot that I downloaded, and maybe if you can think of any that might cause slowdown, or any other download-related things that could cause slowdown...

Okay. Here we go:

GasCooker's prop packs.

AS Retro GT Plant

Somy Microwave Rectenna Plant

CSX WFK - CSSG Walls

CSX Cablecar

CSX Mine - BIg John

CSX Mega Props 04

WFK Ocean Basket

WFK PRops Vol 01

CSX Essentials1

CSX Rural waste

CSX Farm vol 01

The several dozen dependencies Farm has

Rising Sun Oil Refinery

Botanic Gardens

CSX Farming Fuel Depot

Parksv2 GardenersCompound

WFK Wave Power

A bunch of Peg things

beachset v2.11

FM_BeachesForIrregularCoats

Aaand everything else looks like Farm dependencies.

[Sam 163]

Your computer specs look ok, but it might be worthwhile to just check up on the computer maintenance, eg scandisk, defrag, free disk space, paging file, clean the dust out, so it is running at peak performance.

If you have a lot of animated props in your city this can cause slow downs. For example the seagull problem - if you have several lots in your city that use the seagulls animated prop, your game can be very slow.

I have also found that once the city gets big and you start to experience slow downs, you can make it run a bit faster if you set the Number of Cars per Sim option to low, rather than high.

A fairly quick test might be to remove all your plugins and see if the game is still slow. This might isolate it to a possible computer problem, or a plugins problem. Then maybe put some of your plugins back in and see if it is slow again. If not keep putting plugins back in until you find which one is the likely culprit.

[tchaos713 5]

My (somewhat) educated guess is that you're having to page more of your plugins. My plugins folder is almost 2GB and I experience slow-downs every time I play due to this. In fact, when I remove my plugins folder I experience a Noticeable difference in speed.

My $0.02 anyway.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Because of the high number of plugins, I would increase your page space as well.  Put it up to the maximum (4095MB).

If you can, eliminate any unnecessary background programs but be very careful.  I recently hung my machine by being just a little careless with this.