Whenever we have a group of droids out on our server, the tps/ups drops to practicaly nothing at all. It seems it has something to do with their pathfinding. As soon as one is placed it drops hard.

How many are there? How many forces have you guys got running at once (is it just the default forces or are there many?) have you tried with less people in the server or different people (could be a particular person's computer cannot handle the processing too well, causing lag)?

You say it lags when a droid is placed, that could be related to the squad joining code, or as you say it could be pathfinding related as well. Give me more details please

Sry for late responce.

When placing a single droid with the 4 of us on causes a serious drop in UPS for several seconds, as well as whenever a group starts to path find to an enemy base.
This happens with either just one droid, or a large group of them. We have tried with just 2 of us on (I am local, other guy right down the road), and the UPS drop was as bad, but still significant. I tested in single player, and there was practically 0 UPS drop. It seems to be something to do with the amount of data sent in the packets possibly?
We are using default forces(no forces added).
As well, we were not able to test if it was the actual group join mechanic, as f5 only shows a crapton of debug info, but not the group circle mechanic as described in mod info.
Hope this helps in tracking down the issue, as I really love the concept of this mod.

Factorio's multiplayer is designed in a way that not just ping is a problem but each player's computer is important. Is it possible that one or more of the other players has a crap computer? If only one guy has a slow pc and the calculations take much longer on theirs then the entire server slows down for everyone..

I've tested out my mod on LAN and online servers with at least one other player and it wasn't obvious lag when droids were placed but maybe the server itself and the other players were all good spec PCs..

Can you test with other guys with very good PC and/or Internet connections? I wonder if it's a spec/optimisation thing I can do to reduce the load. That will help everyone though and I am working on speeding up various bits of code anyway

I'm also having this problem, but on singleplayer. I have my robots limited to 250, and get pretty severe lag which I'm pretty sure corresponds with each spawn of more robots. Also, the squad AI seems to be struggling - once I have more than 2 or 3 squads (of 20) hunting, any more squads will just stop where they are and never move again, forcing me to run out and pick them up. The map is well on its way to becoming a megabase (36 MB save file), so that's probably already got resources stretched thin, but I'm really hoping to be able to use this mod so I don't have to slog through multiple hours of biter clearing.
(This is running on an intel i5 30 @ 3.2 GHz with a GTX 550 Ti graphics card, if that matters.)

Riun355, have you explored a lot? there is a 5k tile radius for searching for enemies, is it possible the squads are just not being deployed close enough to the biters to find a target?

They're probably less than two radar-lengths away from biters. The whole map is about 10 radars across at this point, so I don't think the 5k radius should be an issue.

could you somehow host your map and any relevant mods in a zip and email me a link to download the package (see mod info file for contact email). I will load it up and see what's happening maybe I can work it out

Sent.

Redstoner and Riun355, I bring good news. In my testing of Riun355's map, I have eliminated the large lag spike when spawning droids! Before I was placing droids by click-and-drag and when placing 15-20 droids my FPS would drop down to about 35-40, now it's a clean 60. Expect these changes in 0.2.1 soon!