Hello, I am looking at the filemon log from a recent test flight and it seems like something is happening when I get long pauses. It seems strange to me but maybe it is supposed to be this way.While I am flying, FS is accessing all or many of my aircraft perodically - and not just the ai aircraft. It is trying to access ui aircraft. I checked some of the ones that it was accessing and none of them are mistakenly in any traffic.bgl's. Since I have 1000 aircraft with 10,000 textures, it is no wonder why reloading the ui aircraft would cause a pause. Is this behavior normal? If not, does anyone know how I can fix it?

Bumping! I recall there was a discussion of a program that tracks and logs exes' calls including FS9.exe. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm interested to find that discussion.Thanks.Dirk.

Wow. 122 views and nobody has a clue.Maybe my question is a little convoluted. I will try to rephrase it.Once my aircraft is loaded and I am flying1. Is there any reason that FS needs to reload all of my flyable aircraft every so often?2. When you fly, does your FS reload flyable aircraft every once and a while?To give you an idea what once in a while means - FS accessed all of my flyable aircraft 3 times during a 15 minute test flight. Each time it went through the same sequence FS goes through when try to change the aircraft you are flying.

Maybe FS9 has to look to see if its an AI aircraft or not. But there must be another answer.billg

It's strange. It will gook at some ai aircraft but a lot of the ones it reads are not ai aircraft. In addition, it doesn't read every aircraft, just enough to make it stutter.I would really like to figure this out because I believe this is what is causing most of my pauses.

The most discouraging thing I found with Filemon was the fact Windows would attempt to locate files that apparently don't exist on my HDD. Files that seem to be something XP wants as part of the system, however, I've never deleted any files or anything. Frustrating.

>The most discouraging thing I found with Filemon was the fact>Windows would attempt to locate files that apparently don't>exist on my HDD. Files that seem to be something XP wants as>part of the system, however, I've never deleted any files or>anything. Frustrating.This most likely was caused a system crash or power hit you had at some point and the files were never rewritten from the cache as a result. Do you have your memory usage setup from programs or System Cache? The later has been known to cause this and could even result in your system no longer being bootable. If you are set for System Cache make sure you have a current backup always. I would recommend though you keep it st to Program. The percieved increase in system performance is not worth the potential risk!

>It's strange. It will gook at some ai aircraft but a lot of>the ones it reads are not ai aircraft. In addition, it doesn't>read every aircraft, just enough to make it stutter.>>I would really like to figure this out because I believe this>is what is causing most of my pauses. >Just a thought: did you try without AI active to see if it still occurs?

>>It's strange. It will gook at some ai aircraft but a lot of>>the ones it reads are not ai aircraft. In addition, it>doesn't>>read every aircraft, just enough to make it stutter.>>>>I would really like to figure this out because I believe>this>>is what is causing most of my pauses. >>>Just a thought: did you try without AI active to see if it>still occurs?I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

This most likely was caused a system crash or power hit you had at some point This might be true - but Microsoft Windows (and Apple's OS and Lunix) have default retry search patterns - as does FS. That is probably 99% of the searching for files which do not exist.If a file is not present - FS will search additional paths and types of files where it has been programmed to find as alternate locations.An example would be a search for a lightmap texture for an AI aircraft. The first place FS looks is the folder holding the main texture as referenced in the fltsim.x section of the aircraft.cfg file.If it does not find the lightmap texture there, it will search the main FS texture folder, then it will search for a .CAB file.The most efficient method is to place the lightmap texture in the main FS texture folder - because if the texture is used multiple times - on many AI aircraft - FS will only need to find and load it once.This also prevents FS from loading 40 copies of the same A320 lightmap file which many people do with individual lightmap textures in each AI aircraft folder. Significantly cuts down on memory resources because by putting the same texture in many folders - you have told FS each is unique and different.BTW - this is one reason every texture file for every aircraft - including your flyable aircraft - needs a lightmap texture - to avoid FS searching many times for a file which is not present.

Flight Simulator does not know any difference between an AI aircraft and a UI aircraft. There is no configuration setting or marker which identifies and aircraft one way or another.There is a setting which will display or not display an aircraft in the Select Aircraft window - but FS does use flyable aircraft as AI - such as the default Boeing, Beech, Cessna, Lear and Mooney aircraft.When FS looks for an aircraft to fit a requirement in the AI traffic file - it searches every title= entry in the entire aircraft folder until it finds an identical match.When FS loads AI traffic originally - it reads and caches the active AI aircraft. But when you move to a new area of the world while flying, or the time changes to cause the traffic database to want to display new aircraft - FS searches for those new aircraft.While an AI aircraft in the database which does not match any title= entry will cause the system to search a bit more - I haven't found that to be a significant factor in the operation of the sim.Do your stutters occur while sitting on the ground, or while flying?Do they occur at exactly the same place in a flight every time?Do they not occur when you have AI traffic turned off?If they occur at exactly the same place in a flight and do not occur with AI traffic turned off - the most likely cause is "aircraft initilization failure" due to lack of parking.The FS retry sequence for AI aircraft at airports when there is not an available parking space appears to be one of the most resource intensive in the application. This is maginified because there are usually many aircraft which go through this retry cycle at the same airport.This impacts flying because every airport with in 108 nm of the flying user aircraft (Traffic View Board is really a flying user aircraft) must have sufficient parking for the all AI aircraft scheduled to be present.I find the TrafficToolBox Explorer invaluable in finding an airport which has a parking issue - watching it try to initialize aircraft at an airport and failing to successfully create them.

It's pretty clear that, in general, lowering the amount of ai activity improves system performance. Could this be because there are problems with the ai programming logic and not just because there are more ai aircraft flying around?billg

Of course everything you add to FS, every add-on has a negative impact on performance. No - I don't include replacement default textures in this group - but NEW textures do negatively impact FS. The more stuff FS has to deal with, the more resources it takes.But many very complex UI aircraft use more system resources than 100 AI aircraft.There are timing issues / errors which impact AI aircraft performance - most notably on approach - but those are the only issues with the programming logic I'm aware of and they really do not negative impact system performance per se.However, the AI system is designed for a maximum of five incoming aircraft on any one approach. That is easily verifiable and observable in FS.Those of us who love AI and try to have realistic schedules simply overload the system with too many aircraft. So it doesn't work efficiently.We also violate two other of Microsoft's rules for AI traffic.We use minimum turnaround times at airports of less than 45 minutes because that is how many of the world's real low cost airlines work - Southwest in the US, RyanAir in Europe as examples.We use a program to create our traffic files - Traffic Tools - which does not have safety checks to prevent adding more AI than the airports have available parking, and several other items.The parking issue seems to be the biggest impact on performance for most people.We don't realize that not enough parking at KEWR & KLGA has a major negative impact on our aircraft at KJFK.

>>If it does not find the lightmap texture there, it will search>the main FS texture folder, then it will search for a .CAB>file.> Has anyone actually tried using a single lightmap file in the main texture folder instead of copies in each aircraft texture folder? IMO to force FS to search a second location for each and every lightmap file for AIs is more of a waste of system cycles. Also say we need 40 AI planes in one location, FS will still search for the lightmap file 40 times as it loads the planes, won't it? Won't it still find the file 40 times no matter where it is and send it to Vcard 40 times? A lightmap file is, let's say, 250k in size. If we need 100 ai aircraft at a busy airport, I'd rather it costs me 250 x 100 = 25mb of ram than it doubles FS's workload to look and find the lightmap file that each plane calls for. Just a thought.Jason

or when adding the great ultimate GA packages, the little airports in my game become the problem with a lack of parking! But I like to fly around California, and the amount of time it would take to add parking for each airfield that sees a lot of traffic would be ridiculous.Heres hoping FSX finds another way to deal with it (maybe by creating more parking spaces in the first place!)