This problem does not happen with every flight - it's an ocassional but annoying one.

I have frame rates locked at 30. After flying for 40min  or longer, I have noticed that the frame rates have dropped to 3-6.

The sim becomes unflyable. I've tried to refresh scenery and turn AI traffic off. But this does not help.

Even restarting FS does not help - it starts up at 3-6 frames.

The only thing that does help is to re-boot my computer.

What could be causing this problem?

 

Specs are:

E8400 core 2 duo @ 3.0

Win xp SP3

4 Gb DDR3 ram @ 1333

nVidia GTX 560ti

 

 

Trevor

 

 

What could be causing this problem?

 

The fact that you tell us that even after you shut down and restart FS9 the frame rates are still very low but recover when you reboot you computer implies to me that you may have a computer issue. That could originate from the OS (not to likely), a problem with the ram or you graphics card. When you shutdown to reboot the ram on board the PC and the graphics card is purged along with the virtual ram. That would explain why rebooting allows FS9 to run normally for a while. The next part is that there is the possibility that FS9 has a problem that is causing this. Do you have any other games or programs that put a big load on ram and video processing? If so try running those and see if you have the same problem and need to reboot. There are some monitoring programs and test programs (free) that you may need to get and use before you can narrow done the problem and find the solution. You might also look or ask in the MOBO, RAM, CPU's & Other Hardware section down in the Hardware & Operating Systems Discussions section of this forum.

 

It could be a 'leak' from FS9 or some other program running with / for it or it could be hardware and settings on your system. Sorry, I can't be anymore definitive than that without actually seeing for myself. I realize this isn't really the answer you were hoping for, but it is a start.

 

Regards,

https://technet.microsoft.com/pt-pt/sysinternals/bb896653

 

is the free process explorer utility from MS. In real time (default polling is one second) it can show you the CPU resource percent is being used by each process. I use the process panel only.

 

Along the top status line I have the time line graphs showing for various resources such as the CPU use graph. Hovering the mouse along the timeline shows the process consuming that resource at that moment. On the bottom status line I have the readout of physical ram in use, user physical ram being used, paging information (ram to/from disk swaps), and other performance data.

 

In the table you will have multiple instances of process labels. Hovering the mouse over that label shows the command line that called it up. In this case the parameters in the command line will differ for each instance.

 

The CPU column will show the percent of use for each process. The higher the CPU idle time the better. Look for processes that eat up CPU resources.

 

Keep an eye on user and system physical ram used. If you are using the 32 bit version of XP then the system and apps only have 2 GB of ram to use of your 4GB. I am assuming you have not installed the "large address space" modification to XP and to FS9 to use it.

 

Be sure your Win system disk partition and your assigned swap file assignment disk have plenty of disk space available, 2 GB each or better. Keep an eye on virtual ram use as well.

 

Just alt-tab between FS9 and Process Explorer. Be sure FS9 is set to not pause when it is not the top window "in focus".

 

You can add columns to the table as well if not there by default. I have the virtual memory each process uses.

 

I assume you are allowing Win to normally shut down so "garbage collection" of memory  no longer used is cleaned out. Some fast shutdown utilities skip this.

 

That's all that I can think of at this moment.

 

Caution:

 

Do not right click on a process and select to kill or restart it as it might hang your system. Don't kill any system processes you do not understand nor any tightly integrated applications such as anti-virus.

 

Play with that utility and see what resources are shrinking over time and what processes are using up those resources.

The only other thing which springs to mind is your computer may be overheating.

 

A little judicious cleaning always works wonders.   B)

Thanks for the responses guys. Appreciated.

 

But , I think it's actually time to upgrade my computer and move on to Win 7 !!!!!!!!

 

However, I will still give your suggestions a go Ron and see if that helps in any way.

 

Trevor