fsx-se Long Pauses in FSX-SE - Please share your ideas/solutions

[MarkW 1,491]

I have everything working great in FSX-SE, all of my usual scenery, aircraft and utility addons are in place and the sim looks fantastic.  Memory handling is excellent, etc.   The only problem is that I am experiencing longish pauses (1 to 3 seconds).  This usually happens on takeoff, and when turning.  I have done complete defrags of the hard drives, let FSX-SE rebuild the fsx.cfg, rebuilt the shaders, tried unlimited frames, limited frames, reducing sliders, etc. but nothing seems to fix the problem.  Anyone else seeing this issue and if so have you been able to fix it?

[CoolP 283]

I can only guess that a look at the surrounding installations would make sense. Namely the VCRedist (MS Visual C++) and DotNet components as those are in use when flying addon planes and/or using tools.

 

It doesn't do harm to uninstall them, reboot and get them freshly installed again. Perhaps this is able to fix the issue.

[MarkW 1,491]

Good idea, I will give it a try.

[neumanix 113]

You might also have some textures with faulty alphachannels. Download DxtFixerX (in my sig) and see if it helps.

[MarkW 1,491]

You might also have some textures with faulty alphachannels. Download DxtFixerX (in my sig) and see if it helps.

 

thanks will do.

[CoolP 283]

When you run the sim without addon modules (dll and exe), does it still develop those pauses you've described?

 

There are some things running in the background, for example AI generation and placement (depending on the addon) or those ground vehicles at addon airports (AES lite) which could cause pauses or just hiccups.

 

Should have asked that question before so please don't get confused that I post it now. :blush: The thinking being the reduction of possible error sources, so that the search gets easier.

[MarkW 1,491]

Have not tried that yet.  So I just rename dll.xml and exe.xml to dll.bak, exe.bak and it will run with out them ?

[CoolP 283]

Yes, renaming should work or just move them out of that folder. The sim will start, just without all the modules and if it does fine, you can add them one by one. Perhaps this then points to a certain issue while the background of those modules often is bound to the installations I mentioned in the first post.

[MarkW 1,491]

CoolP, ok did what you said, got rid of the dll.xml and exe.xml and the pause went away.  I slowly started adding back in modules (FSUIPC, PMDG, etc) and tried again and looks like for the most part the pauses are gone.  There was a bunch of stuff in there copied over from my boxed fsx files so that was probably the issue.   Definitely the issue is much much better and the small stutters I have seen have been on a view switch but if I stay in the pilot view or outside view and look all around there is nothing.  Thanks so much for the help!

[CoolP 283]

Mark, that's good news and if you ever wanted to invest plenty of time while looking at some statistics, I could recommend Process Explorer or other tools from the SysInternals Suite, which, when set up correctly, log every process running in the background and e.g. how long it had to wait for the HDD or which files it was looking for, if it actually found them and so on.

 

Can be a tedious task though since some items feature a long lost of dependencies.

 

As for the dll.xml, you can set up different templates if you like, so that when you want to fly the Concorde, only the three dlls from her get loaded plus the other ones which are really needed. Keeps the system clean and if you later switch planes (lets say to the MD-11), you throw out the Concorde dlls and put in the PMDG ones.

[MarkW 1,491]

Thanks, good to know.  I have used Process Explorer in the past so may check that out if I find I still have problems.

[MarkW 1,491]

So here is the what I hope is the final result of following the suggestions above from CoolP and neumanix.

 

1) Removing the old obsolete entries from my copied over FSX in the dll.xml seemed to help but then the problem reappeared.

2) I ran the program to ensure all of the bgl files had proper alpha channel and again it seemed to fix it but then the problem came back.

3) Finally I rand Process Explorer and noticed that during the long pauses (3 to 4 seconds) the program MsMpEng.exe took up almost all of the processor.  This little bugger is difficult to get rid of as it apparently is part of the OS and is definitely part of MS Security Essentials.  I have managed to exlude files to stop it from running more than 0,01% of the processor but I am not really sure if you can competely get rid of it.  I guess I need to uninstall MSSE and move to something else like Malwarebytes.  Any recommendations here?

 

Anyway for now it looks good.  

[JSkorna 137]

Turn off Real Time Protection in MSSE and see. I have used MSSE for years and it have never effected my flight sim performance.

[MarkW 1,491]

Turn off Real Time Protection in MSSE and see. I have used MSSE for years and it have never effected my flight sim performance.

 

Yes this is what I did and problem is fixed. 

[MarkW 1,491]

....and one final piece to the puzzle.  I noticed a very slight stutter and at the same time a program shooting to the top of the list in Procexp64.  It was quick and took a few tries to figure out what it was but turns out it is Microsoft SearchProtocolHost.  I killed it with alacritypc and the next try (a circuit around FSDT CYVR in the PMDG777 was smooth as butter.  Looking forward to flying tomorrow!