Dear all,sorry to bring this up again, as I know it has been covered extensively but the result I have is amazing enough to talk about.I followed the most bogus and moronic tweak suggestion I have ever read in this forum, or so I thought ....I compressed my FS9 folder. With a 12,7 GB installation of FSsoandso.2005 Mesh my hard disk space was nearing its end. I could have copied some files here and there and enlarge the FS partition but was to lazy to do it. I also wanted to watch a football game so the FS computer did not have a lot to do, so I decided to compress my FS9 folder as I remembered that some had reported wonders about fluidity and performance, which I thought was completely laughable, but at least noone reported any performance loss.So I did it and .....hit a perfect homerun. After the defragging process the fluidity of the sim has greatly improved. I was suddenly able to handfly a perfectly smooth pattern around KSEA with TrackIR watching left and right, ActiveSky rainy day, lots of clouds, UT AI at 70%, dual monitor setup with many gauges on the 2nd monitor (1600x1000 Monitor1; 1024x768 Monitor2). I have gained at least 5fps overall in this setup (this is in a 20fps environment). I strongly suggest to all the naw sayers to be very careful about this one. There is one difference to before though. Whenever FS has to suddenly load a huge ammount of new textures, like a new cloud layer, or an airport scenery coming into vicinity, fps will considerably slow down for a few secs. After that they go up again.I have not sit there with a stop watch but did not notice a hugely different loading time of either sim or flight.Just want to mention that I have a decent HD with 7200rpm, and 8MB cache and defrag regularly.The rig is XP3200@210FSB, 1024MB Ram, GeForce 6800GT.Other tweaks I have applied are shutting down services according to blackvipers super tweak settings, changing the PCI latency of my vid card to a less insane 64, setting the Texture Bandwidth to 500 and some minor things mostly depending on my hardware.I have been doing this for like 5-6 years now. I am not an IT expert, but I know my way around computers, so don't give me that additional CPU cycles, can't work... yadda yadda stuff. It works!! Whether it is left over CPU cycles, improved PCI usage, I/Os, or left over x-ray from my latest doctor visit..or simply the placebo effect I don't care as I am extremely pleased with the result. If you have some hours to burn and havn't tried yet, I encourage you to do so.Cheers,Alex

It just baffles me that compressing the FS9 folder reduces stutters for some.Not denying that it works for some people, I just don't understand *why* it works. If anything it should make stutters worse - granted, data transfers may be ever so slightly faster because the files take up less space on the physical drive meaning less data to read and transfer from the HDD. On the other hand transfers should use way more CPU cycles because all the data has to be uncompressed in real time. If anything, that would *cause* stutters :-hmmmAnd yes I tried it both on my laptop and on my desktop system and it really made no difference at all, neither for the better nor for the worse.

Whatever the reason I am sure there is a perfectly logical explanation for this. Might well be hardware related. Maybe it has something to do with wait stages, cycles, hardware architecture more than anything else, i dunno. The question never arose what mainboards the people with positive results have. Normally you would guess that CPU cycles is the last you would like to sacrifice and yet everyone said at least that there was no difference in performance after compression. This fact that noone reported worse performance alone is surprising and tells me that there is something that makes up for the additional CPU cycles, and I believe it is something different than faster load times.Alex

I suppose it could depend on just what exactly is cuasing the stutters on a given system. If for some reason the stutters are cuased becuase the process of loading data is not fast enough then compressing the data might actually improve things. THat would rely on the possibility that the loading of data might take longer than the decompressing of that data once loaded. It seems to me that decompressing would be totally processor reliant while loading data would be a data transfer issue...

I think that this is not directly related to HD loading times at all really. Because with 1024MB RAM there should not be one stutter that is directly related to HD access. The drive has 8MB cache too. Also I am not talking stutters here at all, which could be directly related to HD access. I am talking gain in fps too. Naw for me the compressed drive seems to somehow improve CPU or bandwidth or I/O usage. Something that has a direct relation to performance.Alex

This is just the thread I was looking for!!! :-jumpy I'm having a terrible time with stutters on my system. I enabled the overdrive feature on my ATI 9800 card and install a Rag memory Overdrive memory utility. I'm still having problems through. Seeing as a great point has been made that about how Windows has to uncompress compressed files in order to use them in FS2k4, I'm wondering would it help to uncompress all my scenery files. What I'm saying here is it seems to be worth a look to uncompress all add-on and default scenery files. This includes all Lago Ultimate Traffic aircraft texture files(well, let's just say the whole aircraft folder to make things easier)...I'll let you guys know what I find. I still don't see any reason totally uncompress my whole FS2k4 installation...

>I compressed my FS9 folder.How?. Do you mean put it in a zipped folder or is it something else?

You have to use the native NTFS-compression. This requires Win2k or XP. If you run any of those two OS'es and use the NTFS system, just right-click your FS9 folder, select properties, then Advanced, then check the Compress This Folder box and click OK. Doing this will take quite a while. If you want to undo it just uncheck the box again." I am talking gain in fps too"So if you're just the ramp at some airport and bring up the FPS-counter, has the framerate increased? Then it's even stranger because FS barely loads any new data from the disk when you're just standing still - it pre-loads everything when you initially start the flight.

" I am talking gain in fps too">So if you're just the ramp at some airport and bring up the FPS->counter, has the framerate increased? Then it's even stranger >because FS barely loads any new data from the disk when you're just >standing still - it pre-loads everything when you initially start >the flight.No, no difference standing still. I mean fps flying through clouds doing turns, flying levelled.It is already a lot more clear to me what happens. Jean Luc who surely has the kowledge to do such a statement already pointed that out in an earlier thread. He said:"Why is FS running better with compressed files is because while it loads a file, the hard drive / ATA / PCI / DMA (whatever is used to transfer the bits from the disk to ram) is "blocking" FS to run less longer (since there are less bits to read). You can easily spot this on lower end systems, even with ATA133 drives: anytime there is a huge load of files from the hard drive by FS, the FPS drops. As soon as the disk activity settles back to nothing, FPS raises again. I suspect that any file access either stall the CPU (requires the CPU) or maybe "locks" the PCI/AGP bus to some extent.I've discovered that any file intensive gauge (a gauge which reads and writes to the hard drive files, like a database), has an impact on performances as soon as it access files. The only way to reduce this was to put the disk access code in a thread, and lower the thread priority 1 notch (in the code).In that, decompressing a file in memory takes really little CPU useage, and if the FPS hit is due to a locked bus (PCI/AGP) during disk access, it would then mean that while the CPU is decompressing, the video card can still render / fetch textures on the AGP bus, etc..."So if this is true it is perfectly clear to me why I see such in increase in fps during flght. By limiting disk I/O you actually free up the PCI/AGP for more throughput. My new 6800GT easily outweighs my processor. So any gain in PCI/AGP throughput immediately hits hard as the card is waiting for the CPU/Memory system to deliver anyway. So if you have a card that is at it's limit anyway you are likely to see any gain at all. For example my 9800XT scaled so well with my CPU that shutting down services brought no noticable performance gain. Now suddenly it is a whole different ball game.Again, sorry for bringing that up again. It has all been said before. Alex

So if I compress my FS9 folder, what if later I want to add scenery to it? Plus if I want to uncompress it, will it be just as easy?

If the folder is compressed all files that you add to that folder will have the atribute compressed and XP will compress them automatically for you. Uncompressing is as easy as compressing. It is just a right click on the file and then change it's atribute to uncompressed. No nuclear science at all. Alex

Thanx Alex

So how do I limit disk I/Oand/orput the disk access code in a thread, and lower the thread priority 1 notch (in the code)???? :-hmmm

No, LOL....that was just an example from Jean-Luc how he took advantage of the facts (?!) in one of his add-on gauges. Jean-Luc is running RealitXP. For you it is just enough to right-click your FS9 folder, goto advanced settings and tick compress folder. Be advised though that depending on the size of the folder this can take up to 3 hours (mine took 3hours and 14 minutes). Also be sure to defrag the FS9 partition after the compression has finished.Hope that helps,Alex

I had tried compressing the FS folder last year (on a different system than I have now) when it was brought up then. After reading Alex's post above explaining how it might help a system with a video card that has longer legs than the CPU I gave it another shot. Sadly, it did nothing for me but I've been quite happy with the performance and smoothness of this sim. Hopefully others who try this tweak will benefit.Greg