General curiosities about fsx and addons

[Cashel 0]

Hi ive built a new system and am using my fsx once again and to start im sorry if there have been topics like this before im new to avsim. Anyway ive been enjoying fsx but ive ran into a bit of a problem with my addons. I have mega airport dublin orbx ftx ireland and im using my airbus x extended on windows 8.1 however whenever i fly around dublin for awhile in any heavy aircraft like the airbus x or the captain sim 727 it crashes after about 10 minutes. This doesnt happen anywhere else in the world only dublin. Anyone have any suggestions ? Also im planning on installing orbx ftx global and rex essentials +od and im just wondering if they will have a significant impact on fps thanks

[MarkW 1,490]

Can you be more specific about the type of crash.  Do you get a message saying "Your computer has run out of memory" or does FSX just minimize and is gone?  There is (or at least was) a entire sub forum on CTD (crash to desktop) issues.  One of the first things to try is to add in the uiautomationcore.dll.  You probably also need to update your FSX.cfg to optimize it for addons.  For details on how to do this look at the box to the right of the forum titled HOT SPOTS and find the CTD guide there. 

[Cashel 0]

Okay thanks for the help

[scianoir 610]

Hi ive built a new system and am using my fsx once again and to start im sorry if there have been topics like this before im new to avsim. Anyway ive been enjoying fsx but ive ran into a bit of a problem with my addons. I have mega airport dublin orbx ftx ireland and im using my airbus x extended on windows 8.1 however whenever i fly around dublin for awhile in any heavy aircraft like the airbus x or the captain sim 727 it crashes after about 10 minutes. This doesnt happen anywhere else in the world only dublin. Anyone have any suggestions ? Also im planning on installing orbx ftx global and rex essentials +od and im just wondering if they will have a significant impact on fps thanks

 

Aerosoft Dublin, although great, is unfortunately quite resource hungry and if you combine that with an aircraft that is also resource intensive you can fairly quickly reach the 4GB limit of VAS (Virtual Address Space) and then FSX crashes with an OOM (Out of Memory) error message. I do quite a lot of flying out of Dublin and for that reason I tend to avoid the more resource hungry aircraft. There is plenty about OOMs on the various forums and quite a lot about Aerosoft Dublin VAS usage on the Aerosoft forum.

 

Bill

[Jim Young 2,356]

You might want to download and run AppCrashView and post the results of the latest crash here - see AVSIM CTD Guide located to the right of any forum under Hot Spots (as suggested by Mark). I doubt it has anything to do with an OOM or lack of VAS as you state the crash occurred after 10 minutes.

 

Best regards,

[Don t moderate me this way 882]

750 MB VAS footprint for Aerosoft Dublin - could indeed be the nasty OOM ... plus some view switching.

[Jim Young 2,356]

Thanks Oliver, but in 10 minutes? In any case a crash report will provide us with the evidence.

 

Best regards,

[Cashel 0]

Im very confused because i dont think its an oom error because it says there was a fatal error and crashes to desktop yey ive done some tests in different places eg same aircraft in ftx ireland but this time in shannon where i dont have any airport scenery installed and then i tried dublin in the airbus but with ftx ireland off and it worked fine.

[MarkW 1,490]

You can definitely get a CTD (fatal error) situation when there is a scenery problem.  I will always happen over the same area.  There are more difficult to find and fix, however, there are some scenery tools out there that can help you find the problem.  Unfortunately I don't have any program to suggest as I have not suffered from this problem but I am sure a search of Avsim forums will lead you in the right direction.

[Jim Young 2,356]

I don't think it's an OOM either.  That's why you should run AppCrashView so we can see what the Windows Error Report states.
 
There's a tool in the AVSIM CTD Guide (I think on Page 3) to install in your FSX.cfg that will look for missing scenery textures or objects and give you an idea if there is something wrong with the scenery textures/objects but it is very common to have missing textures and objects so you may get some false ideas that this is the cause of the crash when it is not.  Yet you can make copies of the error messages and provide them to the commercial developer of the scenery to see if they are a problem. I remember the infamous g3d.dll crashes where individuals would get a crash in the Seattle area but that problem was trapped by the fsuipc.dll utility and no longer a problem.
 
You can try running Process Monitor to see what was running at the time just before the crash:

Setting up the Process Monitor for FSX – Another investigative tool used to pin down a situation where FSX/P3D freezes, crashes, or stutters/pauses during a flight is to run a utility called Process Monitor - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645. During your flight, this utility monitors activity such as calling textures, AI aircraft schedules, ATC, weather updates, and scenery loading. When FSX/P3D stutters or FPS drop dramatically you simply write down the time it occurred. This is important as thousands of entries are made every minute, every second. Continue doing this throughout the flight. Of course, if it freezes, you will know what was going on before the sim froze. This utility will not show you a definitive cause of your issue but it will show you what add-ons were being loaded about when you received the stutter, the long pause(s), and the freeze and you can further investigate by disabling that scenery, that aircraft, or whatever might have caused the event. One member used this utility to determine that My Traffic X, version 5.4c was the cause of a BEX/StackHash/NTDLL.dll crash he was getting. It was easy to disable My Traffic X in the Scenery Library and find that FSX no longer crashed.

AVSIM recommends you do not run a flight any longer than 60 minutes as the Process Monitor log becomes quite large. For a 60 minutes flight, expect the file to be at least as large as 8GB’s or tens of millions of captured events. Make sure you delete the log or move it to another drive after you have finished your testing to free up HDD space. Another recommended tip is to make sure you use system time to mark the time of each event and do not use an external clock unless they are sync’d. Going through one minute of a glitch is a massive amount of data needed to be reviewed (it goes fast as thousands of entries just show a scenery being loaded).

To run this utility properly, you need to capture only FSX/P3D events. It would be nearly impossible to find a possible glitch if Windows events or other system activities were being logged too. AVSIM recommends opening of the Process Monitor when you are on the active runway and preparing to takeoff to save space on your HDD:
Open Process Monitor. Click on the Filter tab and then Filter….

Display entries matching these conditions:

Where it says Architecture, click on that and select “Process Name”
Go next to the blank box and click on that and select FSX or P3D.exe and make sure “Include” is shown (FSX or P3D must be running when you do this!!). Once completed, click on Add and then click OK at the bottom of the form and Go Fly.

You can use the utility while in Full Screen mode or Windowed Mode. In Windowed Mode you can monitor what is happening instantly but it is best to run Process Monitor in Full Screen (unless you are seeing freezes in Windowed Mode).

When the flight is finished, immediately go to the Process Monitor application and hit Ctrl+E on your keyboard to capture the events (event logging will continue until you do this). Shutdown FSX/P3D and begin your investigating!
 
Best regards,