Regular pauses every 60 seconds - NOT autosave!

[CharlieBravoUK 12]

Hi all,

I'm writing this with some trepidation as I know pauses (long frames) are something that a lot of us have learned to live with on P3D.

I'm running v4.5 and it's a relatively fresh installation after having suffered for years with the consistent repeatable long frames at various geographic locations caused I think the consensus is by a combination of a lot of UK2000/ORBX scenery. (although not exclusively in the UK).

So the new installation has minimal UK2000 (I used to use the VFR airfields products so they were everywhere) with ORBX, not AI traffic (I fly exclusively on VATSIM) and for a while everything was kind of OK, yes there were still the odd long frame in busy places (approaching London TMA etc.. etc..)  but the odd one I could live with.  And wierdly and bizarrely I WAS running FSUIPC autosave and it WASN'T giving me any grief with pauses.

But - for about the last six weeks (maybe) I've started encountering absolutely regular, repeatable pauses every 60 seconds...  Not initially on a flight but maybe after an hour or so and then for as long as I run the sim (I've gotten into the habit now of flying multiple sectors with turnrounds on the A320 without restarting as VAS is no longer an issue).

These pauses once they start are regular as clockwork - every sixty seconds the GPU utilisation drops to 0% the CPU takes a small drop and then after maybe 2 or 3 seconds we're back in business, and then another one comes and another - but ALWAYS regular as clockwork.   So, the first thing I did was of course disable FSUIPC autosave, thinking perhaps some Windows update had caused the autosave process to give me a problem now, but it's not changed anything.   I can't help feeling that the answer must be obvious - but I'm struggling.

To be clear - these are not the geographical based long frames, (I still get those sometimes but can live with that) - this is something different.  I'll attempt to list my system specs and what I'm running below... I'm lucky to have a reasonably high-spec rig and generally the performance is very good, but something must be "polling" the system ever 60 seconds, so I'd be ever so grateful of any thoughts?

P.S.  All the "usual" precautions are taken - anti virus excluded on all P3D and related software folders/volumes etc...

Elite Z270 Micro-ATX - Intel Core i7 7700K @ 5.00GHz
Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 3200MHz
Running Windows 10 Pro 1909 build
Samsung 750 EVO 250Gb SSD - Windows 10
Samsung 970 EVO 500Gb - Prepar3d
Samsung 970 PRO 1Gb - ORBX, Freemesh Terrain & FLai
Samsung 830 250Gb - REX skyforce/environment force/soft clouds
RTX 2080ti 12Gb - running 441.66 drivers
43" 4K monitor (3840x2160) running at 30Hz (vsync enabled)

Prepar3d v4.5
FFTF
Chaseplane
REX Skyforce/environment force/soft clouds
Parrallel 42 Precipit FX & 777/A320 immersion
Track IR
Vpilot (host)
GSX v2
ORBX - quite a lot of it including Global, Vector, True Earth Netherlands & UK south, a number of airports
UK2000 - Heathrow & Gatwick
A select number of other airports (but this problem occurs once it starts wherever I am, even over the mid atlantic)
PMDG B777
FSLabs A320
FSUIPC/Wide FS

On a remote PC I'm also running
Wide FS
Active Sky
ASCA
Vpilot (remote)
Navigraph Charts
BAVirtual Merlin ACARS

[Gabshall 43]

Does Task manager give any indication of what is using resources? I had to kill some silly LED control services to reduce some cpu load.

[D Nelson 23]

A while back Windows 10 settings, personalization, change picture every 1 minute interfered with P3D. I set it to 30 minutes and the problem went away. Just a guess...

[CharlieBravoUK 12]

9 minutes ago, D Nelson said:

A while back Windows 10 settings, personalization, change picture every 1 minute interfered with P3D. I set it to 30 minutes and the problem went away. Just a guess...

Don - you might have just hit the nail on the head - the only thing that's changed in the timespan I was experiencing these problems is that I allowed Windows to sync my settings with my Microsoft account - the simulator PC used to have a fixed image, and now it has a slideshow changing everyone 1 minute.....  what's worse - it's hosted on OneDrive so it's having to download the image each time - it's amazing what you miss!

I'll give it a try and report back!

[CharlieBravoUK 12]

And just to close this off - it was indeed the desktop slide show that was the culprit.   I even re-enabled the FSUIPC auto-save and all is still good!

Thansk again Don!

C

[D Nelson 23]

Lucky guess, your welcome.