Jump to content
Sign in to follow this  
John_Cillis

FS9 Diagnostics with Filemon

Recommended Posts

I wanted to post a separate thread regarding my participation recently in the thread below. 24 hours has elapsed since I decided to dig into a nagging memory issue of my own spawned by my interest in the thread, which my FS9 has had for a long time, and which I had just become used to.Since my discovery that simply moving some bitmaps to where MSFS expected to find them fixed the memory issue, I've test flown MSFS for over nine hours. Memory use has stayed consistent since--the situation is so much improved that I've set up 64 megs of my 512 megs as a HD vcache, and I will probably up that even more. The cache has really improved smoothness for FS9--not fps, but simply overall smoothness since once an area's textures are loaded, FS9 grabs them from the cache on the next load vs. the Hard Drive.Without a doubt, as I note in the thread below, it seems even if MSFS finds textures it needs, if it is forced to search for them, memory management seems to go out the window. I learned by watching filemon that MSFS seems to search for textures according to a hierarchy if it can't find them where it expects them to be. This search seems to bleed memory quite a bit.Filemon is a great tool for digging into MSFS problems. I wish I could say it was my idea to use it, but I remembered the tool from another thread. FS9 still has life left in it--I don't see myself dropping it until FS-X finds its own and I know what the ideal hardware will be. After my diagnostic journey yesterday, my FS-9 has become FS-9 1/2. Performance is better, and so is my respect for the platform FS-9 has become.http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...g_id=2289&page=-John

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest

good find, but what about my issue? it keeps searching for sceneryutcanadatexture and sceneryutcanadatexture.caband both come up as NOT FOUNDwhy would it do that?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Hi JohnWhere did you find "unused physical memory" in the performance graph?And what were the bitmaps that you had a problem with?Thanks Barry

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest franksalot

Hi John,I'm no PC Techno on a scale of 1 to 10 I'm about 0 :) Could you advise me on how to setup a HD Cache for Fs9, I have 1.5Gb RAM, please?KenSomerset, England

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Ken, I am afraid I still use Win 98 on mt FS9 box. I increase the cache by simply increasing my vcache values. Once textures in an area are initially loaded, they are fetched from the vcache in RAM vs. from the hard drive.-John

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I am using Windows 98's system monitor. I choose Edit, Add Item, then Memory Manager and select the unused physical memory metric from there.-John Edit: The group of bitmaps are referenced in one of the other posts in my thread. They were part of one of the "seasonal ctd" fixes that I added to FS9 a couple years ago.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Since I mentioned in the earlier thread I don't have UT, someone with the product will have to see if they have your issue. Maybe you can screenprint the "NOTFOUND" entries in Filemon so members can see if there's any clues there. I can't understand the sceneryutcanadatexture entry if it's not searching for a specific bitmap there. In my case, the bitmaps were identified.-John

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest franksalot

Hello John,Thanks for your quick reply. Win 98, proves that I'm not much of a tectnical person, or I would have known XP doesn't have a vcache :)KenSomerset, England

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Hi John,I have used Fileman and also Window's performance monitor for various troubleshooting tasks. I am using AVG antivirus, and from using filemon have disabled AVG's resident shield which stops it from its built in surveillance feature. I was told AVG has a "small footprint" insofar as resource use is concerned, so I never bothered to actually watch it in action unitl filemon showed without a doubt how much file-checking its resident shield does.I have also used performance monitor to prove that reduction of the pagefile size 0-2mb actually does result in less paging activity, as one might expect. Some have argued with me on this but it's easily provable if you simply set up your page file on an isolated drive, then have perfmon monitor write activity on the pagefile drive, and you can see the very continous write activity disappears when you shrink the pagefile size to close to zero.My question to you is, how can you tell where FS9 will be looking for a particular file? Just look at the first-listed failure to find folder?I seem to have lost some of the smoothness in FS9 that I had after working with FSGS. It's pretty good, but not as silky as it has been at times. This part is a mystery to me!Noel


Noel

System:  9900K@5.0gHz@1.23v all cores, MSI MPG Z390M GAMING EDGE AC, Noctua NH-D15S w/ steady supply of 40-60F ambient air intake, Corsair Vengeance 32Gb LPX 3200mHz DDR4, Sabrent NVMe 2Tb x 2, RTX 4090 FE, Corsair RM 850W PSU, Win10 Pro, LG Ultra Curved Gsync Ultimate 3440x1440, TCA Boeing Edition Yoke & TQ, Cessna Trim Wheel, RTSS Framerate Limiter w/ Edge Sync for near zero Frametime Variance achieving ultra-fluid animation at lower frame rates.

Aircraft used in A Pilot's Life V2:  PMDG 738, Aerosoft CRJ700, FBW A320NX, WT 787X

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

"My question to you is, how can you tell where FS9 will be looking for a particular file? Just look at the first-listed failure to find folder?"In my case, that's exactly what I did. The funny thing is MSFS eventually found the files in the main texture folder, where I had (incorrectly) put them. I suppose that is the folder of last resort for texture bitmaps. But it seems whenever FS9 errors out looking for a bitmap, it does something to FS9's memory management. Or perhaps it's even a Windows issue, but this seems a problem for XP users as well so I doubt that.Even before I played with my Win 98 vcache settings, I saw an immediate improvement in the sim's smoothness. I may even revert my vcache settings to what they were--I did not see a huge increase upping it from 64 Megs to 128 megs. I think I am finally experiencing the 9.1 upgrade the way it was supposed to be experienced, albeit on my old fossil of a computer. This screenshot was from a followup flight after I fixed the issue:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...id=247159&page=

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

>good find, but what about my issue? it keeps searching for>sceneryutcanadatexture and sceneryutcanadatexture.cab>>and both come up as NOT FOUND>>why would it do that?Thats okay, the UTCanada scenery in that folder has no own textures so there is no texture folder to find for FS9. It seems like FS9 always looks for the texture folder. Which BTW is a logical thing to do because lot of sceneries have their own textures.The UT scenery uses the textures from your FS9texture directory. That way it will also use improved textures like BEV, GE pro, etc.


simcheck_sig_banner_retro.jpg

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest baksteen33

>>I suppose that is the folder of last resort for texture bitmaps.<< Hi John, positive. Here are a couple of observations about FS9's 'behaviour'. :-) Say ObjectXYZ's *xyz.mdl calls texture.bmp, it will first look for texture.bmp in the object's texture folder. If it doesn't find it there, the next thing it does, is look for a cab or cfg-file or whatever it's programmed to do. The next instance might be a search in the general texture folder, etc. At this point, 'it' either finds what it was looking for, forgets it was searching in the first place :-) or starts to loop. As somebody pointed out (important!), FileMon error messages can be without significance. So, single error messages aren't much of a prob. Worse ones are those like Paul's here http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...sg_id=2390&pagewhich is endless looping creating hundreds of entries per second. 20, 30 and sometimes even more errors in the same timeframe won't get users into trouble as far as I would dare to judge. A 100 errors within a 10th of a second will. Hope this adds to thoughts and kind regards Jaap

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this  

  • Tom Allensworth,
    Founder of AVSIM Online


  • Flight Simulation's Premier Resource!

    AVSIM is a free service to the flight simulation community. AVSIM is staffed completely by volunteers and all funds donated to AVSIM go directly back to supporting the community. Your donation here helps to pay our bandwidth costs, emergency funding, and other general costs that crop up from time to time. Thank you for your support!

    Click here for more information and to see all donations year to date.
×
×
  • Create New...