FSX-MS Reducing GSX crashes after landings in FSX?

[TextRich 88]

Greetings everyone.  I am a new GSX Level 2 user.  I love that add-on, but using my VAS monitor, I can see it takes out quite a bit of available memory for the 32-bit FSX simulator.  Do experienced FSX + GSX users have any tricks to using GSX for the boarding and deboarding phases of one flight session without crashing the simulator?  I notice that most of the time after I land and taxi out of the runway I need to add "save the flight" to my post-landing checklist.  That way I won't have to land a second time if the simulator crashes when I summon GSX to tell the add-on where I intend to park my aircraft.  Sometimes summoning the main GSX window is enough to cause the simulator to become unresponsive and eventually crash, even if I have more than 1 GB of available VAS.  I'm trying to avoid having to load from the newly saved flight to free up some RAM since it takes a few minutes and waiting for the black loading screen is a bit of an immersion killer.  I know, there is P3D v.4+, but I am very fond of FSX and am hoping for a more agreeable solution.

For those who may ask if I use add-on aircraft, I mainly use the default FSX aircraft.  It happens on stock airports (however with replaced textures such as REX Worldwide Airports).  I use several other add-ons but most of them operate as separate applications and connect using SimConnect or FSUIPC4.  I have a high end simming computer with settings mostly set to or at near maximums.  I use FSUIPC's built-in VAS monitor so despite the high settings and numerous add-ons I know how much VAS I have remaining.  I'm wondering if there is a rule of thumb to how much VAS I should have to prevent GSX crashing the sim.  My flight last night had 1.2 GB remaining I believe before the sim crashed after landing when I summoned GSX.

[David Vega 348]

Have you tried to adjust your AntiPopUp setup in the Addon Manager?  I don't know if this would solve your problem, but it may alleviate it some.  Setting the AntiPopUp to a lower number, like 1, significantly reduces the risks of out-of-memory crashes but may increase micropauses as you approach an airport.  

This memory issue is what finally convinced me to switch to P3D.  Not having to think about it at all is nice.  But you already know that.  

[virtuali 4,421]

It's impossible GSX would take so much RAM, and GSX it IS an external application what connects using ( just ) Simconnect so, as long as you use a 64 bit OS ( under a 32 bit OS, all your apps would have to share 4GB ), GSX by itself won't take ANY RAM from the simulator, at least in regard with its own code, which runs under its own address space and under its own separate application.

When GSX creates objects, they take *some* RAM from the sim, but surely not 1.0GB, that would be enough to load a complete very complex airplane complete with external + interior + gauges + code, GSX objects are way lighter than that.

In addition to that, GSX ( being an external application ) cannot crash the sim so, what you might looking at, could be something triggered by GSX, which is causing a crash indirectly, for example:

- A problem with your sound card drivers, not supporting or badly supporting OpenAL, which is what GSX uses to create sounds. If the driver is buggy, it might cause a crash ( a driver can ) when GSX is using sounds.

- A problem with video card settings might cause a crash when a GSX object is created, even if they are all 100% SDK-cmpilant, it's possible some of them might use a specific material settings combination that, combined with a bug in the video drivers ( or a wrong setting or tweak that shouldn't be applied to your setup ), could cause a crash ( a video driver can crash the sim or the whole system ).

- Do you have SODE AI jetway docking enabled ? Try to disable it and restart, and see if you still get crashes.

Edited November 18, 2020 by virtuali

[TextRich 88]

Thank you both for your responses!

SAX702, my AntiPopUp for both GSX and GSX Level 2 are already set to 1.  I didn't change any of the default settings there.  View Optimization, Shadows optimization, Altitude Cull, Cap Simconnect updates, and Disable RTT are all unchecked.  Only Ground Traffic is checked.

Umberto, I do indeed have Windows 10 64-bit.

It turns out I didn't have OpenAL installed.  I just updated my motherboard's onboard sound driver to the latest RealTek and just installed OpenAL for good measure.  However I understand OpenAL may not be fully compatible with RealTek as the latter isn't listed there: https://openal.org/platforms/.  Right now my system doesn't have room for a sound card, so I'm hoping installing OpenAL only will be enough.  I am not very experienced with sound cards and drivers so please let me know if I very likely will need a sound card.

I have the latest NVIDIA video driver.  However I do use NVIDIA Profile Inspector and a combination of settings recommended by Steve's DX10 Fixer and the FSX config guide found here in AVSim.  So if I continue to struggle I may have to use NVIDIA's default FSX settings and see if that helps.

Along with the audio and video notes above, I should emphasize that I am able to use GSX on FSX normally with almost no crashing at the start of my flights.  It is the part of my flight right after landings that almost always causes crashes whenever I summon the GSX window.  So I am wondering if at the start of my flights the airports are less busy and overwhelms FSX+GSX less, while at the end of my flights the sim has already loaded a bunch of AI aircraft so that increases the risk of FSX+GSX being overwhelmed.  So at this point I have to save my flight first and then load it after FSX crashes to bring the scenery to a similar state to when I start my flights.  I never have a problem summoning GSX after I do that.

Yes, I do have SODE AI jetways enabled (AI traffic detection).  I am hoping to be able to keep that, but unfortunately it makes sense that it may overwhelm FSX+GSX.

So I will try testing these one at a time over the next few/several evenings and report back:

___ Install OpenAL to be used with my on-board RealTek sound

___ Set AI Traffic Detection in SODE to False (which is the default)

___ Use default FSX NVIDIA Profile Inspector settings

Please let me know if there are other ideas.  Thank you again!

[TextRich 88]

I can't believe it Umberto.  I just completed my third airliner flight in around a week after installing OpenAL.  I did not get any crash after landings for all those flights.  Thank you for going out of your way to provide support here and to your team for a fantastic product.  I should have purchased it the second Level 2 came out!  💗🛬