P3D freezing every 10-15 seconds

[mspencer 420]

So I posted this on the P3D official forums, but dear god I am hoping AVSIM peeps can be a little more helpful than the super vague chorus that drags the topic off into the wilderness there.

About every 10 seconds, and always at cruise and until landing, I'll get 2 little microstutters every ten seconds, about 1 second apart. They last for 1-2 seconds at most but it is... jarringly bad. Very annoying and difficult to watch without wanting to claw out your eyes.

I am running a fair amount of addons to be fair, but it's happening consistently in the Feelthere EJet, the FSLabs Airbus, the Aerosoft Airbus, and the NGXu.

I thought it could be AI traffic but I removed all the AI traffic from the simulator and I'm still having the same issue. I had a similar issue with Navigraph Simlink, and terminating that seemed to fix it right up, but I've tried that here and it didn't work.

Stats are as follows:
P3D V5.2 HF1
Ryzen 5900X
32GB DDR4
RTX 2070 Super

Running:
ActiveSky
Some addon scenery, but flew out of two very light ones and had no issues
AIG traffic with AIG Traffic Controller

Please do not post the Advanced Configuration guide. I've gone through that and cleaned up a lot of things in my CFG. That doesn't seem to be the issue here.

Could possibly be something sound related, I know there have been issues with sound devices or drivers in the past? I have an onboard audio interface, a sound card, but both have spotty drivers, so I've been using HDMI audio from my monitor. Definitely wasn't having this issue about a month ago, and I was using HDMI audio, so I doubt that's it.

Any ideas?

[polosim 837]

Have you installed FSUIPC?

[kevinfirth 1,392]

An easy try, but delete the prepared.cfg.  I had a similar problem a few weeks ago and spent ages trying to find the culprit. In the end getting P3D to rebuild the cfg and adding back in my personal preferences fixed the problem.

 

Edited October 27, 2021 by kevinfirth

[Ray Proudfoot 8,905]

1 hour ago, kevinfirth said:

An easy try, but delete the prepared.cfg.  I had a similar problem a few weeks ago and spent ages trying to find the culprit. In the end getting P3D to rebuild the cfg and adding back in my personal preferences fixed the problem.

But you never identified what the problem was. Having to reinstate all your preferences is a pain.

To the OP. Try a default aircraft. I know it’s a nuisance but if it does the same you can eliminate all your third party aircraft. Do you have Autosave enabled in FSUIPC? If so disable it but I very much doubt it’s the problem.

Has this problem always been there or has it only started recently?

 

[kevinfirth 1,392]

3 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

But you never identified what the problem was. Having to reinstate all your preferences is a pain.

To the OP. Try a default aircraft. I know it’s a nuisance but if it does the same you can eliminate all your third party aircraft. Do you have Autosave enabled in FSUIPC? If so disable it but I very much doubt it’s the problem.

Has this problem always been there or has it only started recently?

 

Ray, copying a couple of text lines from a backup wasnt exactly onerous 😉  However, it did resolve my problem, which I was unable to narrow down to anything else despite extensive efforts.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,905]

16 minutes ago, kevinfirth said:

Ray, copying a couple of text lines from a backup wasnt exactly onerous 😉  However, it did resolve my problem, which I was unable to narrow down to anything else despite extensive efforts.

Ah right, so you didn’t just delete the existing cfg. You just replaced a few lines.

That’s different to deleting it and letting P3D build a new one.

[kevinfirth 1,392]

4 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Ah right, so you didn’t just delete the existing cfg. You just replaced a few lines.

That’s different to deleting it and letting P3D build a new one.

No, I deleted it, made P3D build a new one, then just quickly customised my settings by overwriting some of the lines from a backup

[Ray Proudfoot 8,905]

Understood. Let’s see where the OP gets with the suggestions made.

[mspencer 420]

Thanks everyone.

I do have FSUIPC AutoSave enabled, but it's set for every 6 minutes. This is happening every 10-15 seconds.

This issue really just popped up in the last few weeks - I took a look at the addons in Lorby Addon Organizer, I haven't installed any modules or anything like that since the issue started.

The audio issue seems like a red herring, I had a friend who had some sort of configuration in audio induce a P3D slowdown. The audio continues during the slowdown.

Deleting P3D.cfg is fairly easy, I might try that as well just to give it a shot, and dump the shaders and stuff. So far no joy, will be a few days before I can report back as I'm leaving for a retreat tonight.

[dave2013 1,123]

Pull up the Task Manager while you're flying and see what your CPU usage is.

When I had heavy stuttering, my CPU usage would jump to 100% on all cores except 1, and it was over 70%.

I discovered that the CPU was getting hit hard whenever I opened the GPS or Nav Map and zoomed out to >50 miles.  P3D apparently doesn't throttle or limit how much cpu power to use for loading the map data, so the flightsim processes get sacrificed to load the data.

The same thing happens when loading a flight plan from the Scenario Startup UI.  The map displays the entire plan, which is usually hundreds of miles, so has to zoom out the map.  It takes up to a minute for P3D to load and display the detailed map data, and all the while my CPU usage jumps to nearly 100%.

I use ORBX FTX Vector, and I read on another forum that this may exacerbate the issue as the sim has to search for and load a lot more data.

Dave

 

[mspencer 420]

3 hours ago, dave2013 said:

Pull up the Task Manager while you're flying and see what your CPU usage is.

When I had heavy stuttering, my CPU usage would jump to 100% on all cores except 1, and it was over 70%.

I discovered that the CPU was getting hit hard whenever I opened the GPS or Nav Map and zoomed out to >50 miles.  P3D apparently doesn't throttle or limit how much cpu power to use for loading the map data, so the flightsim processes get sacrificed to load the data.

The same thing happens when loading a flight plan from the Scenario Startup UI.  The map displays the entire plan, which is usually hundreds of miles, so has to zoom out the map.  It takes up to a minute for P3D to load and display the detailed map data, and all the while my CPU usage jumps to nearly 100%.

I use ORBX FTX Vector, and I read on another forum that this may exacerbate the issue as the sim has to search for and load a lot more data.

Dave

 

That's where I went first and yeah that's unfortunately not it, would easily be fixed with an affinity mask.

CPU usage will stay nice and low around the 25-30% range; we're at cruise here at night with only the strobe lights on over the ocean lol.

Still stutters every 10 seconds. It's bizarre and infuriating.

[B777ER 2,475]

Had this happening as well. For me the stuttering behavior you describe is when my scenery was loading in the distance as I flew along. Even with a powerful computer the program was hiccupping (stuttering) when it went to load scenery.  Specifically, it was too many roads selected on in Orbx Vector. I deselected everything but the main highway one and my stuttering disappeared. 

[cyyzrwy24 118]

I have that occasionally and remedy, for me, is to delete Shaders and cfg....That works for me. Although I haven't had any issue with sound so far.

[Ian S 214]

I have noticed this too over my last couple of flights. It's too early to say for sure, but it was quite noticeable last night when flying over heavy cloud. As the skies cleared, so did the stutters. I'd need to do some more testing to verify this though. I was also over a largely rural expanse of southern Russia when I encountered it, but it was fine landing over the city, so I don't think vector traffic is contributing to my problem, further to the above post.

[blaunarwal 432]

Missing files is the answer:

 

Scan with Process Monitor. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon

I made a filter only showing prepar3d.exe file operations and color file not found. You will certainly see how prepar3d is searching files for hundreds of miliseconds on the wrong place. Just go into slew mode and turn your aicraft around you and you´ll see lots of missing files. Often one file is searched quite a long time. That gives a stutter. 

Then put copies of the files where prepar3d.exe is searching them or define proper texture.cfg search paths to the textures that are missing. Never move files, just create copies. 

Mostly textures are missing but also *.wav files. Sometimes they are not even on your system. Lot of freeware designers just deliver sceneries with missing textures. So search them with google. In a scenery, in an aircraft, somewhere you will find it. Of course one could also ask here, if a fellow simmer has a *.dds file or just create it. Often it´s not a complex texture but just a metal surface, something like this. 

Searching a file on the sytsem is easy with Everything: https://www.voidtools.com/ It is really fast and finds everything.

Finally, if you use F1 GTN, you need to restart after using Procmon, since this remains in memory and GTN doesn´t like it. The sim doesn´t care. 

If this sounds spanish to you, don´t hesitate to aks.

Dan