Slow saved file loading while in game - purposely or bug?

[iiee]

Under custom game (seeding turned off), loading a saved game while in the game is very slow especially after mid game (wont notice that in early game)

If i [Exit to main menu] --> [Single Player] --> [Load Game], the saved game is loaded much faster (at least 8-12 times faster, in late game the difference is bigger). I have tried comparing the time, loading while in game took 105 seconds, loading from main menu is only 11 seconds.

Is that because of CIV4 does not want the player to load game to change the game result and purposely make this trouble?

This problem exists since first Civ4, I have played all expansions and this problem still remains. Tested on 3 different machines.

 

[ori]

I doubt that it is intentional
Civ4 uses extremely high amounts of memory. When you load ingame it probably tries to load the complete new game into memory prior to deleting (some) of the memory used for the old game - this would make things slow down on machines with just enough free memory (just enough is a very relative term and in Civ4 can mean a lot of memory - also graphics memory is a bottleneck) because it has to rely more on the page file for doing this. From the main menu this problem is much more limited.
Now this is just a wild guess, but the memory hunger of Civ is a fact - so it would make sense

 

[iiee]

Hmm, that make sense too. But it is just too slow to load in game, ... more than a min to load a game is simply unacceptable...

My machine is FX55, 2Gb Ram, X1900XTX, 4x 15k.5 Raid0, i-RAM (just for pagefile)

 

[Psyringe]

But it is just too slow to load in game, ... more than a min to load a game is simply unacceptable...

Whoa ... I play with 1.5 minutes wait time between turns in the late game, and you say that one minute *load time* is "simply unacceptable"? I guess we must be very different people.

Imho, one minute loading time is definitely okay for a game as complex as Civ4, especially because you're not supposed to reload often anyways. Spending one minute once at the beginning of a play session (which can last several hours) is not an issue in my book.

Anyway, if it really disturbs you, I'd recommend to exit to the main menu before loading a game. The loading times definitely aren't a bug.