Significantly higher Entity time usage than previous classic miniloaders.
Currently I'm seeing 1~2.4+ in entity time. Previously, even with a megabase I would seldom see loaders exceeding 1.

Has this been noticed by anyone else?

Hi, I found hight ups cost too.
This is because the old version of the mod used invisible inserters and this version uses a prototype loader.
12,000 loaders require about 5-6 ms to update each tick
While 12,000 invisible inserters require about 0.8-0.9 ms to update each tick.
I hope smb will create a mod that will be more ups-friendly.

The reality is that the Miniloaders mod, each miniloader was 4 or more entities for each Miniloader. It was 1 1x1 Loader, 1 Container, and 2 or more Inserters. In this mod it is only a single loader.

It is worth doing some testing to see if there are some improvements we need to report to Wube. If someone could start with what 12,000 Miniloaders in 1.1 looked like, that could be a jumping off point. The fact of the mater is, what ever entity update time is being taken up by loaders in this mode is a result of the game engine, and a direct port of Miniloaders would be the same (if not more) because each one of them uses a loader as well - in addition to the 2+ inserters each.

But yes, if there are some empirical data we can provide to Wube, I'll be happy to submit it.

When I used the Miniloader before (Before Spage Age), I always used them instead of inserters whenever I could because of how good they were with performance.

Compared to my last run: Currently I have about a tenth of the amount of miniloaders being used, and the entity time is a constant 5~7, whereas the previous save with 10x the miniloaders topped out at about 0.32~0.4 (Much faster too, had 8 tiers of belts compared to just 4 in the current run)

A small aside I wanted to add is that the original miniloader had a much more powerful split lane filter, as I was able to designate up to 5ish different item filters per lane; currently it is one per lane only.

Was there a big change on Wube's end regarding how loaders were implemented? (iirc it's in the game, just not active.)

Yes there was a huge change in that none of these features existed in loaders in 1.x.
In 1.x -
Loader (before 1.1.75) could not interact with trains
Loaders did not have a split lane capability
Loaders did not allow filters as input (belt to container).
Loaders could not be connected to or controlled by signals

Every feature in Miniloaders in 1.x was because they were hacked together with invisible inserters working on an invisible container that a real loader dumped things into. In the case of it's split lane function, it had multiple inserters targeted at specific lanes on the belt. There was a whole lot of hackery in Miniloaders to get it to do what it did. It was amazing hackery, but fragile at times.

I'm not really sure the assessment of UPS is accurate. I think some focused attention is needs and it should be looked at. After you notes last night I built a 1.1.110 game with 16K Miniloaders, and a 2.0.19 game with the same number of Loaders Modernized. I didn't notice a glaring UPS problem on either one. But it was 2 AM and I was getting a little cross-eyed. I'll take a look again later today and try to post my findings.

I have a base that's gradually growing and I used your mod to speed up train and belt loading. I saw my UPS and FPS plummet today when they were all active after some base optimisations and the loaders were at 14 in entity time. Definitely a UPS issue needing to be looked at as they aren't scalable to anything nearing a megabase with the current performance hit. It's a fantastic mod and thank you for making it, but the UPS issue definitely needs to be resolved for them to be practical for anything other than a mid-size base.

Any UPS issue will need to be reported to Wube in the bug reports or Technical help forum. See https://forums.factorio.com/68653. Unfortunately there is little I can do here since this mod is not doing any continual processing. All the entities that are doing work are native to the factorio game engine.

That's curious @kryojenik. Loaders are now at 40 on my bigger base. I will take a look at the source and see if I can catch any bottlenecks. I'll submit pull requests for anything I find.

Is anyone able to share one of these save games with ups issues related to loaders? If so, I can start to document things for wube.