How long is the longest you've had to wait for SC4 to save a city?

[City Planner 121]

This is starting to become really annoying to me.  There are times that my cities (even the medium sized ones) save in less than 30 seconds or so, and more and more however, there are cities that may not even have any buildings on them, just the landscape that are hanging when trying to save.

I'm just wondering how long I should actually wait before giving up and killing the process in task manager and lose any work that I've done since the last save, which may actually be a while since I don't remember often to save every 10 to 30 minutes.

What is the longest you've waited while the game is supposedly saving, and actually had the game save and come up with the save confirmation?  10 minutes, 20 minutes?

Updated with the following:

Just so that people understand, here are my computer specs so that they can tell me that my computer is too slow if they like...

AMD Quadcore 2.2GHz

8GB System RAM

Windows 7 64BIT Profesional

Nvidia 275 GTX video card  (with something like 800MB of video RAM)

[kristinaswan 2]

10 minutes?  Really?  I have had some cities take a bit to save, especially if there is a large amount of flora (God planted), or if they are large maps with large populations/activity.  Probably 1-2 minutes at most, though, is the longest I can think of it taking.

If it is taking longer than that, you must be running on an older machine (PIII at less than 700MHz), running low on memory (background processes or running the game for periods of more than an hour at a time), or just don't have enough memory (less than 1024M on XP or less than 2048M on Vista).  This is an old game, so the requirements are not hefty, but depending on the size of your plugins folder, it could be quite a bit higher than the original requirements.

Most likely it is a background process issue you are experiencing, but that is just a guess.

[lgbrave4life 1]

I use to have your same problem..it would take sometimes take 10 or 15 min. I figured out later, it was my computer that was actin up and being slow but i had that fixed and now it only takes like 30 sec. or less. It could also be that you have alot of custom content or you might have alot of downloads from the STEX in your city, but thats all i can think of. However, the problem i do have now is that when the game is loading up for me it takes a good 5 or six min. every time! Now i have no idea why that happens.

[chocolate_city 93]

10 minutes... I've had to wait that long on huge cities with millions of people and lots and lots of plug-ins... but some plugins (in a different thread and what I.m currently working on) can take longer than that to add to a city !!!

[City Planner 121]

I should have been clearer. I've not actually had the game successfully save the game after 10 minutes, in fact any longer than the normal 30 seconds or so and I have to force exit the game in task manager.

I do indeed have a lot of plugins about 3.8GB worth, however I just had the game stall at saving with a new city tile that I hadn't done anything more to than some minor terraforming for about 10 minutes or so, and after 10 minutes I gave up waiting for the game to save.

I'm running SC4 on an AMD Quadcore 2.2GHz, with 8 GB of system RAM, on Windows 7 64 bit. So I'm pretty sure it's not my computer as any other programs that are running are still running fine, but SC4 is using one cores full processing power and about 600,000kb of RAM according to task manager.

I guess by the responses that anything longer than about 30 seconds to 2 minutes and I shouldn't bother to wait any longer and just resolve that I've lost any work that I've done since the last save. It's strange that it only happens once in a while, once in a great while (but seemingly more frequently), but annoying enough if you've spent a couple hours working on a city, or even when only spending 10 minutes terraforming the city with nothing else on it. Both equally annoying in different ways.

[ROFLyoshi 1,760]

Don't force the game to quit. Be patient. If I turn on the computer & load SC4, it can take up to 6 minutes.

[City Planner 121]

I don't know, I'd say that 10 minutes is pretty patient when it normally doesn't take more than 30 seconds to a minute or so to save. SC4 loads for me in less than 2 minutes (that's with a 3.8GB datpacked plugin folder too)

[Larks2242 251]

I have had it takw awhile before it really depends on your computer and if you have alot of stuff running that can slow it down.

[gio10469 24]

Whenever the game takes awhile to do anything...usually I just walk away and grab a snack, watch tv, or take a shower or something. By the time you get back, it will be saved! (Of course this isn't always the case, but wishful thinking.)

[MandelSoft 2,769]

I once have to wait fifteen minutes before my city had saved on a Pentium 4 machine. Don't force the game to quit, otherwise you can get corrupted save-files and all would be lost.

[nathanthemayor 1,261]

Depends.........I noticed small cities take a shorter time to save, and vice versa.

[TGYoshi 0]

I thought my computer was slow O_O.

Longest is 5 seconds so far .

[Nuclear550 3]

I don't think it has to do with how fast your comp is. It is possible , since i am assuming that your plugins is un-organized, that your sim city is having a hard time saving it on to the hardrive because some mods weren't compatible and it takes a while for it to figure it out.

[newcrusader92 0]

From my experiences, if I'm running the game in a window, the save is much faster than if I'm running under a full screen. In a window, the save only takes a few seconds at most.

[doorknob60 11]

On my largest city (almost 2 million people, little empty space on large tile), the MOST it will take is 1-2 minutes. I have an Ahtlon 64X2 4600+ (nothing too special) and 4 GB of RAM. I did notice that my cities save MUCH (maybe double) faster under Linux than under Windows (ext3 > NTFS maybe?).

[Legosim 14]

Takes around 5 minutes for lego city to load and around that to save. What bothers me the most is when I select a subway to place. I have to wait at least 10 minutes for it to show up before I can do anything. Happened after I installed NAM im pretty sure. Anyone else have that problem?

[newcrusader92 0]

Originally posted by: doorknob60

On my largest city (almost 2 million people, little empty space on large tile), the MOST it will take is 1-2 minutes. I have an Ahtlon 64X2 4600+ (nothing too special) and 4 GB of RAM. I did notice that my cities save MUCH (maybe double) faster under Linux than under Windows (ext3 > NTFS maybe?).quote>

That's not surprising.  I can't wait to complete my Gentoo (!) installation, so that I can move SC4 over from Windows.

It's more than just using ext3 that can be credited for the improved performance.  Generally, there's less overhead to worry about in Linux (or there are ways of easily reducing it).  There's also better memory management.  I'm not sure if your system will allow for it, but if you use ext4 instead of ext3, things should go faster still.  I've used it for about a month and have noticed significant improvement in hard disk drive access.

[CaptCity 4,666]

Originally posted by: Legosim

...What bothers me the most is when I select a subway to place. I have to wait at least 10 minutes for it to show up before I can do anything. Happened after I installed NAM im pretty sure. Anyone else have that problem?quote>

That's probably due to the new Subway view that was included in the newest NAM. It changed the subway view to show only a few props in order to see where the stations are if "hidden" among tall buildings.

[City Planner 121]

Originally posted by: Nuclear550

I don't think it has to do with how fast your comp is. It is possible , since i am assuming that your plugins is un-organized, that your sim city is having a hard time saving it on to the hardrive because some mods weren't compatible and it takes a while for it to figure it out.

quote>

This would make sense if it did this every time, since the plugins organization wouldn't change between the times that I play with SC4.  But since it doesn't happen everytime I would have to assume that SC4 is otherwise choking on something, but I'm pretty sure it's not my plugins since it doesn't do it every time like one would assume it would do if it were something like the plugins that we use.

But I'm really not sure what you mean by un-organized plugins, if you mean that maybe I've got plugins that are not compatible with other plugins, then I'd have to say not in my plugins.  Unless of course I've downloaded plugins where the author has not stated that his plugins are incompatible with somebody elses, otherwise the only ones that I know of that are incompatible to use two or more versions are terrain, water and rock plugins which I've only got one of each.

The only time that I've noticed that SC4 takes longer to load is the first time that I run SC4 after repacking my plugins with datpacker.  After that initial first time, it usually loads in less than 1 minute or 2 minutes.

Update:

Oh and I can now tell when the city is not going to save... You see when I click the save button, normally the mouse cursor turns into the hourglass cursor.  When the city is going to go into one of it's long binges and not actually save, the mouse cursor simply stays as the pointer cursor.  I just noticed that this happens every single time, so I guess I need not wait for 10 or 20 minutes to see if it's going to come out of it and actually save my city.

[Vahr 341]

My largest city saves in about 15 min, but when I quicksave it (I can't remember off the top of my head what the shortcut for it is) it took about 2 min. Quicksave simply saves the city data but it doesn't upgrade the region view.

As for compatability, generally that shouldn't affect saving time.

As for datpacking, the first load takes longer because the files had not been loaded into the RAM previously.

[Livin in Sim 83]

Originally posted by: Blue Lightning

My largest city saves in about 15 min, but when I quicksave it (I can't remember off the top of my head what the shortcut for it is) it took about 2 min. Quicksave simply saves the city data but it doesn't upgrade the region view.

As for compatability, generally that shouldn't affect saving time.

As for datpacking, the first load takes longer because the files had not been loaded into the RAM previously.quote>

Quick save is Ctrl-Alt-S, and I do find it much faster.  The most crash prone save for me is Save and Exit.  So I usually quick save as I play, then Ctrl-S, long save at the end, then exit without save.

[Josh6 873]

I'm with Livin in Sim. I always quick save to but with my ridiculously bloated plugins folder it takes about 5-10 min. But thats nothing compared to how long it takes to load the game. I havent timed it, but I usually eat a bowl of cereal, brush my teeth, do my homework, and eat some more cereal before it loads.

[Cleaner475 150]

Mine takes about 3-5 minutes - I've only got about 3gb of plugins though and most of the cities I've been working on recently are large tiles but are still growing so only have 200,000 - 300,000 sims

Richard

[Jeiman2008 21]

Wow I had no idea it could take that long. I'm currently running a raid 0 setup with 4 segate barracuda's so nothing takes very long. I get up to 150mb/s transfer rate, compared to about 50mb/s with one drive. The first load only takes me 22 seconds with 2.4 gb of plugins, and saves never take me longer than 5 seconds or so. But even when I wasn't running a raid setup I can't recall the game ever taking longer than a minute to save. Could it be your page file isn't large enough? I read somewhere that you should set your page file to something like 4x the size of your ram.

Edit:  I looked at your system specs and I'm thinking that your hard disk is probably the bottleneck.  Your system should have very little trouble with SC4.  One thing I notice is that when I download a lot of small files they tend to be extreemly fragmented, so I always defrag my disc after installing addons.  I don't know how often you defrag but that could be part of the problem.

[jb2010 0]

Originally posted by: ROFLyoshi

Don't force the game to quit. Be patient. If I turn on the computer & load SC4, it can take up to 6 minutes.quote>

I've lost cities before because I waited.  I'd rather lose half an hour of zoning than lose the save file to corruption and wind up deleting the entire region.  To each their own I guess.

[Walden95 8]

I remember wayyy back when I had a windows98 somewhere around 2003/2004. Massive citties even when they wern't modded still take a long time. I'm guessing around 20 - 40 minuites for a city of 500,000 pop. My computor was infected. That upgrade to XP was very much appreciated.

Now it just takes seconds with Vista although there are a few slowdowns durring startup.  I'm going 7 in less than a year so hopefully the mods don't even get a chance to slow it down anywhere. And mabye keeping a little bit of extra space for a real SimCity 5 for the future; either that or CitiesXL 2011.

[ed_diaz 10]

on my large map city with 25k population, industries and commercial... about 80% growable and 20% plopped, tons of trees and tons of flora. my city takes no longer then 20-30secs to save, i never counted it but i know it never takes like a min .

Gateway laptop NV53 series

Win 7 64bit home premium

AMD athlon X2 II dual core M300 2.0Ghz

4Gb ram

ATI Radeon Mobility 4200 HD with 256Mb dedicated.

running SC4 in 1366x768x16 window mode, Windows XP SP3 compatibility mode and "run as admin" checked.

latest updates/drivers for entire system and also running latest version of AMD's dual core optimizer. also my plugins folder is less then 500Mb so im not using that many plugins

[pckiller 1]

my largest city is 1.3 mill big, and takes about 1 to 2 minutes to save on my old XPS Gen 2 laptop.