Hey there Factorians. I'm playing Factorio v0.17.79, a large handful of mods that are mostly conveniences (i.e., no overhaul mods like Krastorio or AB.)

I've been noticing for my last several play sessions that when I first run the game, everything acts normal. Now I haven't begun trying to ascertain if that is a function of the game-client being open causing some sort of memory leak or equivalent, or if it's a function of the computer itself the longer I've had it running.

What screens, screenshots, debug overlays, etc. would have info that could shed some light on troubleshooting my issue? I'm running a first generation Asus G7 RoG (cost about $2700 USD back in 2010.) The Windows internal benchmark utilities rate everything at 5.9, which is the highest that Windows 7 can detect, and this laptop is still nowhere near due for a reformat and reinstall of everything that I do once or twice a year with all of my machines.

Lagspikes don't seem to be getting worse individually, just more frequent. My own estimate is that the UPS / FPS counter in the upper right corner of the screen spikes down to 40-45 at least four times for every 10 seconds.

If someone could point me to info I can gather, I'll happily post it to imgur. Thanks.

The recovery partition only restores to Windows 7, which I know will be a problem after mid-January this year -- but I'm wondering if whether I choose to upgrade Windows or start browsing for Linux distros might have some bearing on gaming performance for single-core-single-thread games like Factorio, KSP, etc.