Here are my updated findings: 

1. Turned Defender off, no change
2. Happens with any plane, even up at altitude when GPU/CPU are coasting along
3. After using ProcMon to see if I could see which processes are associated w/ these hard pauses, I changed affinity for MSFS to all cores except Core0, and changed explorer.exe, cfmon.exe and audiodg.exe to Core0 as these 3 processes were associated with these pauses but by far, it's explorer.exe.  I also changed Priority for explorer.exe to below normal, and MSFS to above normal:  no change--still seeing these pauses and I'm pretty certain it's explorer.exe that is associated with this:

 

Edited October 14, 20223 yr by Noel

1 minute ago, Jack_Sawyer said:

Thanks.  Dang, I don’t even know how to 😞 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/add-an-exclusion-to-windows-security-811816c0-4dfd-af4a-47e4-c301afe13b26#:~:text=Under Virus %26 threat protection settings,within the folder as well.

 

1 minute ago, Noel said:

Here are my updated findings: 

1. Turned Defender off, no change
2. Happens with any plane, even up at altitude when GPU/CPU are coasting along
3. After using ProcMon to see if I could see which processes are associated w/ these hard pauses, I changed affinity for MSFS to all cores except Core0, and changed explorer.exe, cfmon.exe and audiodg.exe to Core0 as these 3 processes were associated with these pauses but by far, it's explorer.exe.  I also changed Priority for explorer.exe to below normal, and MSFS to above normal:  no change--still seeing these pauses and I'm pretty certain it's explorer.exe that is associated with this:

 

 

Hey Noel,

Have you taken a look at your disk usage while this is happening? Just a thought

3 minutes ago, RJC68 said:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/add-an-exclusion-to-windows-security-811816c0-4dfd-af4a-47e4-c301afe13b26#:~:text=Under Virus %26 threat protection settings,within the folder as well.

 

Thanks 

I have been getting momentary pauses and occasional memory leak crashes since SU10.  The occasional momentary pauses I can live with but when they are happening every 20 or 30 seconds it gets pretty old.  They may only lasting a millisecond but its very noticeable in an otherwise fluid experience.

I have not found the cause yet but I have a few suspects.  I suspect its something in my community folder like one of the enhancements like the boat harbor upgrade or one of the scenery upgrades I have done.  I also strongly suspect it might be REX Accuseason and/or Weatherforce since I just recently added those applications.  It seems the problem really started when I added these season and weather enhancement packages.  

About the only thing I can do is stop using Accuseason and Weatherforce and then start stripping my community folder.  I have always had the occasional momentary pause when loading scenery or whatever but it was only once in a great while and after a half second it was back to business as usual.  However now the memory leakage and stutters is pretty regular.  I now can't even fly out of London without my sound cutting out and severe pausing and within a few minutes the sim just crashes forever.

 

 

20 minutes ago, RJC68 said:

Hey Noel,

Have you taken a look at your disk usage while this is happening? Just a thought

Just now did thanks and yes it appears to be associated.  That 1,284,398 total bytes/sec happened when you see this spike and drop in frame rate.  It would very cool to see if this happens when OS and MSFS are on the same disk, versus separate disks.  Or, if users on Win 11 have these pauses.  I have only one NVMe m.2 drive that everything is on, and it has massive space left as it's 2Tb.  One question I asked here a while back was the Intel ME Driver which I did not install off the MB disk and dang it I don't recall if I installed it for the prior Win 10 install when I did not have these heinous pauses.  I'll go ahead and install it and see if anything changes.

3 minutes ago, Noel said:

Just now did thanks and yes it appears to be associated.  That 1,284,398 total bytes/sec happened when you see this spike and drop in frame rate.  It would very cool to see if this happens when OS and MSFS are on the same disk, versus separate disks.  Or, if users on Win 11 have these pauses.  I have only one NVMe m.2 drive that everything is on, and it has massive space left as it's 2Tb.  One question I asked here a while back was the Intel ME Driver which I did not install off the MB disk and dang it I don't recall if I installed it for the prior Win 10 install when I did not have these heinous pauses.  I'll go ahead and install it and see if anything changes.

I am glad you are a bit closer in troubleshooting.

For Reference I run Win 11 Pro on a small 512GB WD Black NVME (SN770) and MSFS is on a 1TB WD Blue NVME

I have never seen what you are unfortunately experiencing 

18 minutes ago, RJC68 said:

I am glad you are a bit closer in troubleshooting.

For Reference I run Win 11 Pro on a small 512GB WD Black NVME (SN770) and MSFS is on a 1TB WD Blue NVME

I have never seen what you are unfortunately experiencing 

That's great news because it demonstrates something's amiss with my sys.  I just read this and it may apply to my system, I wish!  My m.2 NVMe drive is installed in the M2_2 slot, so I can change it and see if it makes a difference.  When I first installed this sys 2.5y ago I had a dual boot, using 2 NVMe drives, but used the boot that was w/ the M2_1 slot, so perhaps this simple change will matter:

To answer OP's question ideally you want the M.2 SSD in M2_1 expansion slot. As noted in the manual M2_1 is direct to the CPU while M2_2 and M2_3 go through the PCH.
Will it make a noticeable difference? Probably not. Maybe see it in a benchmark. Either way the first M.2(M2_1) is the ideal position.
I am sure there are exceptions but all of the X570 boards I have used in builds the first M.2 slot was direct to CPU.

Addendum:  my bad, it WAS in the #1 slot, so that's out.  Just installed the Intel ME driver so can see if this helps.  IMPORTANT:  this didn't happen in the past, i.e. past Win 10 install, for the better part of 2 years now w/ MSFS and I've always had OS and MSFS on the same NVMe drive.  Hopefully the ME driver plays some role in this!!!!!

Edited October 14, 20223 yr by Noel

Since installing the Intel ME driver it may have improved (have seen less pauses) but too early to tell, and doubtful.  I ran a disk read suite and as you can see AIDA64 read a whole bunch of data, way way more than max I'm seeing associated w/ flightsimulator.exe, and no pauses.  This doesn't mean a whole lot except when the system is busy processing all that MSFS requires AND does a major disk access it does not impact FS.exe, so not sure to go from here.  Ideally, I would love to see someone w/ my sys, frame locked by Vsync to 30, then run DevMode and see if these hiccoughs are happening but perhaps under the users' radar.

Haven't tried DX12 with the latest driver and I suppose I could try that.

2 hours ago, RJC68 said:

I am glad you are a bit closer in troubleshooting.

For Reference I run Win 11 Pro on a small 512GB WD Black NVME (SN770) and MSFS is on a 1TB WD Blue NVME

I have never seen what you are unfortunately experiencing 

Rich, next time up if if works out for you, in something demanding like PMDG/Fenix, can you run DevMode and observe over at least 20 minutes if you ever see these sudden drops below 30FPS as shown in my images?  You would need to lock frame by Vsync to 30 to try to duplicate my system.  Your CPU is more potent but what's happening here happens when there is ample CPU and GPU headroom, so appears to be about a larger disk read in flightsimulator.exe.  Certainly the DiskBench I did suggests the NVMe is not hard on the CPU at all.  Since I've lost the previously pause-free simulator I'm tempted to go ahead and install Win 11 on top of this fresh Win 10.  I have a hard time believing this will help, but I don't know where else to go now.  We really don't know if separating OS and MSFS is required and perhaps this experiment might show something.   If you can run at 40FPS locked that might be closer since your CPU is a good 25% faster for main thread processing over mine.

4 hours ago, RJC68 said:

Windows Defender is an Anti Virus program. Have you excluded anything MSFS related from Windows Defender?

Well, I just added the entire Steam folder and my Users/Jack folder and no change.  I get a 1/3 second pause precisely every 60 seconds.  😞 

11 minutes ago, Jack_Sawyer said:

Well, I just added the entire Steam folder and my Users/Jack folder and no change.  I get a 1/3 second pause precisely every 60 seconds.  😞 

Jack, you can disable Real-Time protection for a short period before it reverts to active--should give you enough time to see if that's the culprit.   I seriously doubt it's an issue and the every 60 seconds piece hopefully will let you troubleshoot this using Process Monitor and DevMode as I did above.   My pauses are not regularly spaced, at least I don't think so never put a watch on it.

3 minutes ago, Noel said:

Jack, you can disable Real-Time protection for a short period before it reverts to active--should give you enough time to see if that's the culprit.   I seriously doubt it's an issue and the every 60 seconds piece hopefully will let you troubleshoot this using Process Monitor and DevMode as I did above.   My pauses are not regularly spaced, at least I don't think so never put a watch on it.

Thanks Noel but I honestly don’t know how to process monitor and DevMode.  Please advise?

5 minutes ago, Noel said:

Jack, you can disable Real-Time protection for a short period before it reverts to active--should give you enough time to see if that's the culprit.   I seriously doubt it's an issue and the every 60 seconds piece hopefully will let you troubleshoot this using Process Monitor and DevMode as I did above.   My pauses are not regularly spaced, at least I don't think so never put a watch on it.

Also, the sim is glass smooth, no stutters, it’s beautiful except for that 60 sec pause.  I’m on Win 10.

8 minutes ago, Jack_Sawyer said:

Also, the sim is glass smooth, no stutters, it’s beautiful except for that 60 sec pause.  I’m on Win 10.

That is pretty much me too Jack.  Just google Download Process Monitor (MS SysInternals) for starters it is a MS product so they should pop up on your google search.  After you've installed it let me know and we can proceed with guidance.

DevMode is part of MSFS.  It's under General Option>Developer>turn it ON.  Then, in one of the top bar drop downs find FrameRate, and that will display frame rate and other information in the upper right part of your screen.