Extremely slow simulation speed

[NoGoalie]

Hello,

I recently got the game on steam after watching a few youtube videos about it and it seemed really fun (I like these management games). Now I do know that especially the simulation of all games in a league can be a little time consuming and I don't mind games taking a bit to process, however, I seem to have an issue where the normal day-advancing simulation gets extremely slow to the point where a part of the day (be it "Morning" or "Evening") takes about 3-5 minutes to process, making a day take about 10 to 15 minutes.

Setup:

I set up a new game with the default database, started on July 2nd and chose a german team to start with, I also have the Czech, Canadian and British leagues enabled (in addition to the german and the NHL). You can see my league setup and the detail settings in the screenshots that I attached, together with a screenshot of the CPU usage of EHM in the task manager (since it also freezes while simulating, which I guess is actually normal).
Currently I am on July 17th, after having gone on vacation for a little more than a week (which took a little more than one full hour) and the daily simulation now takes around 10 minutes, give or take a few minutes. As far as I can see, no games are simulated in any league at this time of the year and though I have quite a few leagues, I put many of them on low detail settings. In youtube videos, advancing a day seems almost instant [1], but for me it takes forever and it really takes away most of the fun from the game that I expected to have, I mean, I didn't even simulate a game yet as far as I can tell, why is it so slow ? And what can I do to make it faster ?

Tech info about my PC:

I got:
- 2 Intel Xeon E5630 @2.53 Ghz
- 1 TB Western Digital (its on the slower side, should be mentioned, is one of the black models. Might a RamDisk or an SSD be faster when it comes to EHM ?)
- 12GB RAM
- Nvidia GTX 750
- OS: Windows Server 2012 R2 (basically Win 8)
- I messed around with the JetEngine and ODBC settings for .mdb MS Access Databases to have some debugging going on. However, after turning it off, it did not seem to improve anything, probably because EHM doesn't use
the MS Access DB format or those old drivers xD (Aurora 4X did, which is why I messed around there).
- While simulation, EHM freezes and continues to take up around 6% CPU usage, which is a little less than 1 core. (and from what I can tell, it might be spread out over multiple cores) [See screenshot]


I would REALLY appreciate any help in this matter as frankly, the game is absolutely unplayable for me right now and I paid for it, I have a decent PC and I would like to enjoy it. Thanks a lot in advance !
~NoGoalie

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNCmvqgtxfU (skip the game and take a look how long it takes for him to advance a day)
[2] Screenshots here: http://imgur.com/a/VP9wZ

[Tasku]

Strange.

I can't really come up with anything else to adjust, than database size. If you're on full, it may take a bit longer...

[CJ]

Strange indeed. Your computer beats my laptop on all aspects. And I can run the game smoothly. Simulating a season takes 70-90 minutes for me (= simulating one day doesn't take many seconds at all; only depends on how many games being played).

No answer from me on this issues?!

[A9L3E]

Sounds like something is broken in your hardware. Do other games work normally?

[NoGoalie]

Hi guys,
thank you very much for your answer, I agree that it is a strange problem. I do however have a Determination ability of 20 when it comes to solving this .

@Tasku: I started an experimental game, with just the NHL most things on the minimal setting (and the database on "normal"). A day now only takes about 50 seconds, which is a lot more playable but there also seems to be a lot less content. I also managed to get far enough where a few games were simulated. Those appear to be pretty speedy (with full detail) and don't really contribute much to the total amount of time taken.

Also, originally I thought my harddrive might be a limiting factor, as I am aware that it isn't the fastest (read 'slow') and I have noticed that as a bottleneck for a few database heavy applications. EHM however doesn't seem to access the HDD at all when simulating, so thats not it. Is there a debug setting that measures the time taken for each simulation step ? (I would assume that there is some sort of order of steps here like: running AI teams to come up with transfers/exhibition games etc., calculating updates to players, coming up with random events ... it may be useful to know which step takes the most amount of time or if they are all equally bad. Then again, I could also understand if such a debug setting is non-existent or not intended to be used in the production build)


@A9L3E: Thanks for the hint, since the harddrive isn't the issue (see above), I have begun to look at other things that might influence this. Usually, I have decent to really good performance on other games, most of those are mainly GPU dependent though. There are a few programs that have been super slow, more so than I would expect, especially starting up, when most things the program uses hasn't already been loaded into the windows cache, which led me to blame my harddrive for those, but I will take another look, maybe I can find something, although no specific hardware component comes to mind. (Checked CPU and GPU with their respective vendor tools already)

[Thomaxius]

I do believe It's a hard drive related problem and not gpu, cpu or ram related ( gpu and cpu at least have nothing to do with it) - it for some reason has extremely slow read speed. Did you benchmark it with hdtune or such?

Also, try saving to a different place, like a different partition. For some reason windows 10 saved to a one drive folder for me, which I think caused some slowness.