Pauses Finally Cured?

[cj-ibbotson 77]

18 hours ago, vgbaron said:

FWIW, this is the first version where I've had noticeable pauses at varying areas. Varying types of pauses also, landed at KRNO and just before  nosewheel touched, a 3 second pause. Other areas sometimes two or three short pauses in a row - not the quick stutter steps we get occasionally, these are definite pauses.

Like others, can't pinpoint a cause yet. But it DOES seem directly related to 4.4 because I did not have them in 4.3.

Vic

 

 

18 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

Same here Vic. I've never had these hiccup-like stutters prior to 4.4. At first I thought they were related somehow to ASP4 weather injection, but the stutters occur infrequently and are almost random in timing.

I've had these long pauses..up to 8 seconds long in both 4.3 and 4.4 Not sure when I first noticed them as may have been back in 4.2 also. They were in exactly the same location even with all settings to the left. Rob Ainscough posted about them in 2015 so not linked specifically to v4.xx

Chris

[cj-ibbotson 77]

12 hours ago, DocPadds said:

I have an i9-9900K CPU overclocked, 16GB ram, 1070TI and 2x1TB Samsung NVMe SSD drives, and performance is rarely an issue on this PC.

 

Except in P3D....

 

I use UTL, ActiveSky, PMDG, QW787 and the ORBX terrain mesh etc...

I was getting awful stutters in the sim even with traffic turned down and running 1080 instead of the native 4K.   I played with many many settings, followed a lot of advice here but in the end two things fixed it

1) in P3D 4.4 I cleared out all tweaks and changes

2) I turned Hyperthreading off.

 

Boom.    Now sliders are up, traffic at 100% etc, where this setup should be.  It looks great, and using UTL or PSXseeconTraffic injected from my utility PC, it flies (no pun intended).

 

So really if you have a good PC with lots of cores, turning off HT was night and day for me.  

 

 

 

HT on or off doesn't stop long pauses on my system. Using a 6700K at present. I've had these pauses for perhaps a year now and only way to minimise them is to reduce the amount of active scenery using an editor

Chris

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

5 minutes ago, cj-ibbotson said:

HT on or off doesn't stop long pauses on my system. Using a 6700K at present. I've had these pauses for perhaps a year now and only way to minimise them is to reduce the amount of active scenery using an editor

Chris

Chris, yesterday I did as you suggested and I haven't noticed a pause since then.

[Cruachan 705]

3 hours ago, cj-ibbotson said:

.....and only way to minimise them is to reduce the amount of active scenery using an editor

Yep, my experience also. Now that some of the more influential ‘big guns’ are experiencing the problem perhaps this issue will be taken a little more seriously and, in time, we can expect a solution....or not! However, it’s rather more likely that the finger of blame will be pointing in our direction and attributed to that understandable end user predilection for overloading our installations since this is allowed by the architecture.

Even more likely, I suspect, that this will be ignored given that Version 5, with it’s shiny new ‘game’ engine and graphics api, should sweep aside such shortcomings....or will it?

Regards,

Mike

Edit: When I first updated from v4.3 to v4.4 I failed to reboot the system before first run and was disappointed with brief, barely noticeable regular hitches occurring every 3secs. This was enough to destroy the immersion for me. With previous versions, performance degradations manifesting as intermittent micro stuttering or, worse, occasional prolonged studdering were usually resolved by performing a cold system reboot. This seems to have worked for v4.4 as well and so far, with limited testing at KVPS Elgin AFB, smooth performance, without pauses, is ruling the day. Fingers crossed!

[cj-ibbotson 77]

28 minutes ago, Cruachan said:

Yep, my experience also. Now that some of the more influential ‘big guns’ are experiencing the problem perhaps this issue will be taken a little more seriously and, in time, we can expect a solution....or not! However, it’s rather more likely that the finger of blame will be pointing in our direction and attributed to that understandable end user predilection for overloading our installations since this is allowed by the architecture.

Even more likely, I suspect, that this will be ignored given that Version 5, with it’s shiny new ‘game’ engine and graphics api, should sweep aside such shortcomings....or will it?

Regards,

Mike

I get long pauses even with just all of ORBX's regions and LC packages enabled. No other Orbx airport or other scenery add on installed and no other add one running. It doesn't take many items listed in the scenery library to trigger the pause. It can go from a slight repeatable stutter to 1s up to 8s full blown freezes of the SIM at the same spots. What I do is if I get a long pause is I slew back a mile or two then save the flight as a test then I can reload it with different amounts of scenery active and see how it affects the pause. Don't even need to fly forwards just slewing has the same effect.

Chris

[Cruachan 705]

Hi Chris,

So many theories as to why this happens. Those pauses that are reproducible, and are occurring at the same spot or in close proximity to the same spot, suggest a local problem involving the problematic loading of certain textures/scenery objects. Another theory is that the sim is somehow being triggered to scan/index Scenery data unnecessarily and this data is situated remotely from the current flight situation. Slewing back from the spot that triggered the extended pause and then proceeding over that same spot without another pause may simply mean that the loading or scanning has completed. I have to say I have tried this in the past. Sometimes it worked, but mostly the outcome was inconsistent.

Regards,

Mike

[cj-ibbotson 77]

1 hour ago, Cruachan said:

Hi Chris,

So many theories as to why this happens. Those pauses that are reproducible, and are occurring at the same spot or in close proximity to the same spot, suggest a local problem involving the problematic loading of certain textures/scenery objects. Another theory is that the sim is somehow being triggered to scan/index Scenery data unnecessarily and this data is situated remotely from the current flight situation. Slewing back from the spot that triggered the extended pause and then proceeding over that same spot without another pause may simply mean that the loading or scanning has completed. I have to say I have tried this in the past. Sometimes it worked, but mostly the outcome was inconsistent.

Regards,

Mike

I was getting 8 second pauses even with every setting off or on its minimum so there basically was so little scenery loading. I could also slew 50 miles to the left and then forward and would still hit this virtual line which triggered a pause. I will switch all scenery on except Ftx England where one known pause occurs and if it still pauses it's not local scenery triggering it. The best way to retrigger it is to reload the saved flight. Rob for pauses in Milford Sound New Zealand and his process monitor app showed at that point Prepar3D was searching through scenery in Spain I think

Chris

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

1 hour ago, cj-ibbotson said:

I was getting 8 second pauses even with every setting off or on its minimum so there basically was so little scenery loading. I could also slew 50 miles to the left and then forward and would still hit this virtual line which triggered a pause. I will switch all scenery on except Ftx England where one known pause occurs and if it still pauses it's not local scenery triggering it. The best way to retrigger it is to reload the saved flight. Rob for pauses in Milford Sound New Zealand and his process monitor app showed at that point Prepar3D was searching through scenery in Spain I think

Chris

That is the "mystery" that some of us are trying to track down... Is P3D doing this "by design" or is it a bug?

Either way, the best defense at present, appears to be to disable any scenery that is not going to used..

Does it fix the problem, no.  Does it remove the pain, yes.

[Skywolf 992]

Hey guys,

I thought something was wrong in my system but I am absolutely seeing this in 4.4

For example I have all Us FTX regions installed on top of orbx global + vector + openlc NA.

I am flying from Orbx KAVX in Realair Turbine to LatinVFR's KSNA on top of Orbx SoCal with UTLive AI.

Now I take off from KAVX and approaching KSNA in the horizon, the sim pauses and my GPU completely drops for a second and then the entire loads up and flight continues.  Why is this happening.  I am just Prepar3d v4 in super fast SSD and Graphics is 980 GTX SLI and all my autogen settings are normal...only major thing is 4096 textures.

any ideas on where to diagnose

I hope Rob can chime in

[Skywolf 992]

Holy frak...these pauses are gonna make me mad.  Please Rob, can you ask Orbx devs in LM Beta forums to do something.  LM and Orbx need to solve this issue.

 

Edited December 12, 2018 by Skywolf

[molleh 451]

In my experience the pauses stem from any add-on scenery that has a ton of custom objects in it. Extremely detailed areas like OrbX's SoCal LA basin area are packed with so many custom objects in a pretty localized area that P3D just simply takes longer to load it all once you've crossed into the LOD radius for said objects. It's really more of a FSX/P3D engine limitation that becomes apparent when we push it to the max with all these really detailed sceneries.

Edited December 12, 2018 by molleh

[kurtb 121]

yeah

[d.tsakiris 418]

Who of you experiencing long pauses has a low FFTF value set in the .cfg, and who doesn't?

[Nemo 1,305]

In my experience FFTF values have no influence on this issue. I have long pauses with default (FFTF=0.33) and also with lower values (0.05).

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

11 hours ago, molleh said:

In my experience the pauses stem from any add-on scenery that has a ton of custom objects in it. Extremely detailed areas like OrbX's SoCal LA basin area are packed with so many custom objects in a pretty localized area that P3D just simply takes longer to load it all once you've crossed into the LOD radius for said objects. It's really more of a FSX/P3D engine limitation that becomes apparent when we push it to the max with all these really detailed sceneries.

While this may be a factor, it does not explain why P3D searches through scenery that is far from the actual location whenever one of these long pauses occurs.

Maybe there are different scenarios, depending on the location

Edited December 12, 2018 by Bert Pieke