My pausing problem

[RKOines 0]

The release and use of the B777 series called my attention to a problem I have been having with both the Triple Seven aircraft and the B737NGX aircraft.  I call it the pausing problem.  During a flight the aircraft’s clock will lose time in 1,2,or several second increments which can add up to an hour on very long flights in the Triple Seven.  I was unaware of the external effect of these pause until a VATSIM supervisor informed me that I was pausing my flight too many times.  OOPS!  It’s not just the clock but the whole system is pausing during these intervals.

I have not been able to find a cause for these pauses that could be directly correlated to any other computer activity.  During long flights, I use the same machine to go to the internet for charts, live atc, news, weather, and sometimes even videos.  None of these activities seemed to cause a pause directly to the extent they could be used to predict a pause by saying, “if I do it, I will get a pause.”  No, this did not happen.  The pauses keep happening regardless of what I am doing outside of FSX even if that is absolutely nothing.  I should add that the pauses are not related to CPU usage that I can observe with the Task Manager.  On long flights over water the CPU usage varies between 15% and 30% very rapidly and regularly giving me the impression that everything is cool, until, bam-- CPU jumps up to 50-60% with little or no variation and a pause of 1 or more seconds is added to the flight.  After an event, the CPU slowly and surely returns to the normal pattern.

Needless to say, I have fiddled with the options in FSX, reducing complexity, resolution, distance, all to no avail.  Even with these changes everything is cool until --- BAM, there goes another 5 (or whatever) seconds of pause.

I finally found a major contributor to this apparent instability problem.  FIREFOX.  Just for grins I decided to try using Microsoft Internet Explorer instead of my faithful friend Firefox and lo and behold the instability disappeared.  A Eureka Moment!  I could do everything in IE (including watch a movie) without the pauses -- until -- last evening I was cruising along with 0 pauses after six hours of flying time and out of the blue and to my complete consternation I CAUSED a five second pause.  I sent a long message to a controller using FSInn texting which starts with ‘.msg XXX ---- lots of stuff here’.  FIVE SECONDS!  FSInn!  Maybe that explains my perfect pauseless flight until I approached Honolulu to land where I managed to accumulate 11 seconds of pausing before landing with doing anything but watching to my dismay.  First Firefox and now FSInn?

I have fought the battle of the pausing problem alone long enough.  It is time for some of you to throw your two cents in.  I have not gone to tech support with this problem because I have felt it was my problem (or my system’s problem.)  Now I am not so sure.

Thanks for your comments in advance. 

 

Ron Oines

[RKOines 0]

Well it appears that I had the answer in the above post.  FSInn was the culprit.  I have removed FSInn from the system and all seems to go well now without pauses.

[jc_150 3]

Hi Ron

Your post was an interesting read to a strange problem. I was about to suggest that you do the same flight but not online with VATSIM and see if the pauses ceased, leading you to suspect something that you use when only flying online, and glad to see you worked it all out and found the culprit. Hope you have discovered vpilot as the connection platform between flight sim and VATSIM as it works flawlessly on my system.

Kind Regards

John Calleja