FSX-MS VAS leakage needs to be conquered some way

[spilok 1,132]

I'm seeing more and more VAS leakage to the point that half of my flights go into an OOM crash more quickly than ever.  It just seems to be getting worse and worse....day by day.   I've be tweaking and re-tweaking and changing graphics drivers and playing with Inspector, etc. etc. for the last month or so. And  I'm really starting to think about drastic measures ( re-installation of fsx?).  I enjoy all this wonderful scenery, planes, airports, weather, and traffic....but boy, does it come at a price!  I've got the latest and greatest system built by Jetline, so my hardware certainly isn't compromising the situation.

I've been exploring VAS and found a VAS monitor on line.  It's called Process Explorer.   It shows you what is using the most memory in your system, and it is constantly changing.  You can  view it in reduced form while opening a program to see the program's effect.  FSX does not do that much when you open it.  It's the other things in the background of your computer system that hogs the memory.  This SVCHOST.exe is the biggest culprit on my system.  Have any of you found a way to reduce its presence safely?  I hear it's very important for the running of Windows and other ancillaries. 

Anyway, always looking for ideas.  I love ORBX stuff,  but I sure have a lot of their product on my system.  Have to believe that all those territories, vector, Global, etc. have a real impact as well.

Well, just thought I'd start another discussion about VAS, and hopefully someone out there may have found the silver bullet that ends all of these OOM's.

 

Stan

[klamal 282]

3 minutes ago, spilok said:

hopefully someone out there may have found the silver bullet that ends all of these OOM's.

P3Dv4

[Chock 17,769]

Typically, an iteration of Microsoft Flight Simulator came out every two years or so, whereas FSX has had to soldier on for over a decade, and it's done well, but like a faithful old warhorse, one day it is only kind to put it out to pasture and take a younger, fresher horse into the fray.

To be brutally honest, if there was some kind of magic bullet which could be applied to FSX-SE to enable it to avoid these issues, DTG would have done it. And they kind of have in a way, in reaching the conclusion that a new 64 bit platform is required. This is why they are working on Flight Sim World. Similarly, Lockheed Martin came to the same obvious conclusion and made Prepar3d 64 bit too.

Like it or not, there is only so much which can be done with a 32 bit application limited to a maximum of 4Gb of virtual address space being allocated to it. Don't get me wrong, FSX-SE had wonders done on it by Dovetail in comparison to the original FSX, and that gained us a few more years of usability, but without it having its architecture changed to 64 bit, that was always going to be limited in what could actually be done without making a tough choice to go with something new. FSX-SE is of course not FSX, but it is nevertheless the same in many respects, and that being the case, it's essentially eleven year old 32 bit coding, albeit recompiled and tweaked a bit more for modern machines. It helps a bit, but it cannot perform miracles, and as Scotty says: 'ye canne change the laws of physics'.

Sticking add-ons developed in the past couple of years into a base program which is eleven years old and which also has legacy content from even longer ago, is never going to end well. We knew this was reaching breaking point when things such as the FSL A320 showed up. Try running that on a 32 bit application with a bunch of detailed add-ons, custom weather, ATC etc etc and it's just not going to happen without the system falling down when it all has to work with just 4Gbs.

It's of course a bit of a bummer to wave goodbye to a sim which has served us all well for so long, but we've done it many times before with earlier versions of FS and it's got to be done again if we want all those fancy add-ons which we demand and want flight simming to progress even further. That is not to say we cannot continue using FSX-SE, within its limitations, but every day those limitations are getting strained further and further by the progression of add-ons, so we have to accept that FSX-SE has limitations as far as contemporary add-ons are concerned. So we really have to accept that anything developed later than maybe a couple of years ago which pushes the boundaries, is probably not going to work flawlessly in FSX-SE without it running up against a hard limit engendered by its legacy bit depth.

[DaveCT2003 1,820]

Stan,

First, what you may think is a VAS leak very well may not be one.  There is a whole process to determining this and isolating of offending process.  You'll find some terrific and very detailed posts here on AVSIM going back several years about using Process Explorer, especially by Jim Young. I believe he's also included a section in the AVSIM CTD Guide on both VAS and using Process Explorer - it's all really worth the read as it provides some info that one might not otherwise consider.

29 minutes ago, klamal said:

P3Dv4

Little thing called the EULA - which we can't discuss here.  Thankfully FSW is being worked on for not students/developers/professionals.

 

VAS/Memory leaks can also occur in 64 bit applications (P3DV4 and FSW in our case), and if bad enough or if there are enough of them they can still cause OOMs. But there are also other problems that memory leaks cause us.  For this reason, they should be reported, investigated, isolated and fixed whenever possible.

 

 

[stephenbgs 169]

I hate to give blanket comment but P3Dv4 is the way to go to.You wont regret it, Its so refreshing to start a flight and learn new techniques without worrying about oom's it breads new life into your sim.   

[honanhal 1,420]

Very well said, Chock.

James

[spilok 1,132]

Wow.  P3D4 seems to be the future according to these responses.  I've thought about that especially since you see all the developers making their products available to that format.  I probably get an email a day referring to a company or developer making their products P3D4 compatible. 

I just may have to make that move.

 

Stan

[scianoir 610]

Hi Stan,

I've been using Process Explorer for quite a few years to monitor VAS usage and enable me to save a flight before the dreaded 4GB OOM threshold and also to assess the VAS impact of new addon aircraft or scenery. Although Process Explorer will show you the many other things (such as svchost.exe - whatever that is!) going on in the background, the main issue unfortunately lies within FSX itself or more specifically the VAS demands of the addons we are using. Although these addons are getting better and better, this comes at the cost of greater VAS usage and a combination of a VAS intense aircraft flying between VAS intense airports can often tip the balance. I often wished developers would indicate the VAS requirements of their addons in the same way as they indicate the installation size as that might be of some help in making a purchase decision. With addon airports in particular the VAS usage is not necessarily proportional to the size of the airport or the amount of detail  and indeed some quite small and relatively poorly detailed airports can have a surprisingly high VAS impact because of poorly optimised textures. 

Accepting that this is FSX and it's not going to get any better, and, like you, becoming increasingly frustrated by frequent OOMs, I now use SIMStarter NG to drastically reduce the amount of scenery running in the background. It takes a little while initially to organise the scenery sets but it is worth it as it has made a very significant difference in reducing the number of OOMs even on long flights. I can certainly recommend it as being far more beneficial to a smooth running FSX and less frustrating than incessant tweaking etc!

At the end of the day however, I accept, as others have recommended, that the only solution may be to move to a platform such as P3Dv4, but, like many other simmers with big FSX setups I suspect, I am putting this day off for as long as possible not just because of the huge investment I have made in payware addons for FSX but also because of amount of time and effort I have spent optimising it. For all its faults I for one am still pretty happy with FSX!

Bill

[spilok 1,132]

You read my thoughts.  I simply "put off" migrating to P3Dv4 because of the PITA factor of just doing it.  However, now that I am retired (sold my business 1 year ago), I certainly have the time.  I just need the patience to do it.  I am assuming all of ORBX is there....don't know, I have to research what's there and what is not.

Is there something in FSX that is not yet in P3Dv4 that everyone is waiting for? 

 

Stan

[magnetite 38]

I'm inclined to believe it's not the simulator that is the problem, but rather all those add-ons people are running. Any of the base sims run excellent. It's only when you start piling tons of add-ons into it that you start running out of memory and suffer from severe performance issues.

I've never personally had any out of memory errors under FSX or FSX-SE, with the exception when I was running Windows XP 32-bit back in the day.

[MikeT707 1,181]

5 hours ago, spilok said:

I simply "put off" migrating to P3Dv4 because of the PITA factor of just doing it. 

It is really not that hard. Just divest some of your FSX tweaking time, as well as that time spent cursing OOM's and invest into installing P3Dv4 as well as the many add-ons that are supported on that platform. Also, recognize that the concept of sunk cost might apply in some cases to FSX, but that is life. Sometimes we have to cut our losses to gain.

As an example from real life, the transmission just went out on one of my cars, which has 270,000 miles on it. I had just spent about $400 on the engine and got a couple new tires, but... I had to realize that I could either spend the large amount of money to replace the transmission and maintain a likely money pit of a car or just kiss the $400 goodbye and get rid of a car with high miles and a bad transmission. I am getting rid of the old car which served me well and already purchased a much nicer and more modern car that will give me more years of service without the headaches of continually fixing the old one. I retired FSX long ago and am being served quite well with P3D v4 now and in the future. 

[electricman 5]

I have FSX with FTX global base, vector and OL Europe , aerosoft mega Brussels x airport and a couple of freeware airports, AS16 and ASCA for the weather and traffic 360 at 50% for AI traffic. I fly the iFly737 all the time and even can perform flights from 5 to 6 hours and never had an OOM.

Most OOM problems come from people wanting to much and settings and tweaks that are just to high like textures 4096 and lod radius 6.5 and so on.

I found out that with a modern machine the less tweaks the better FSX performs and realistic slider settings help to, let's get realistic; autogen maxed out if you do long haul flights and don't see the trees and buildings anyway?

Herman

[Guest JustanotherPilot]

Stan

I've just completed a 5 hour 30 min flight in Prepar3D v4. It was in the 737 NGX which was updated yesterday. During this flight, I was using ORBX AU, originating from Fly Tampa Sydney, the weather was provided by AS for P3Dv4, ACA. My settings were high I returned an average framerate of between 40-50 the whole trip.

This is the first time I have been able to complete this flight, FSX SE would not even allow me to depart Sydney before I got the dreaded OOM. I faired a bit better in Prepar3D v3.4, I managed to get about an hour before running out of VAS,prior to that the flight suffered from stuttering.

Prepar3D v4 with its 64bit platform really is so much better than any previous rendition of FSX/Prepar3D I have used.

It is worth the investment.

Steve

[zmak 331]

Never get OOMS with fsx se and dx10 fixer.

Fly exclusively pmdg 777. 737

scenery..mostly ORBX ,fsdt , fly tampa etc

settings autogen = Normal or about midway slider

LOD = 4.5

texture max load 1024 to be honest 1024 looks the same to me as 4096

I also use process lasso quietly maximizing my pc in the background.Not sure if that has anything to do with it.

 

[vc10man 732]

12 hours ago, honanhal said:

Very well said, Chock.

James

+++1