FSX goes 'Not responding' for 7 minutes and then resumes?!

[Guest abulaafia]

I have used Process Monitor over the summer. It logs every file and registry access. I had it running during 7 of those "events" and I was unable to find anything they have in common "behind the scenes". I"d wait with the sound card until we have some more concrete leads. It could take a while though, seeing that on my rig the error only happened every 50 hours of flying on average. Can you make a list of add-ons you have installed, and post your hardware configuration? Here is what I have now: Asus P5E motherboard with 2x2GB DRAM chips, well tested with a variety of programs. Run scientific calculations programs during the day, no error ever recorded. nVidia 9800, 1GB DDR on it2 x WD HDsClean copy of VIsta 64 + FSX installed now, plus motherboard and sound card drivers form the Asus website, naught else.

[A36 Apache 0]

I was waiting until I heard that your flights sans sound was a success. The card you chose is a great one. Choosing between Professional and Champion series is a personal preference. Personally, I don't care for Creative products, so I would have gone with BlueGears, or Xonar.I would go to Radio Shack and get a y-splitter so you can have two sound jacks to the single card, rather then run two cards. Any USB headphone is going to load drivers and/or programs into memory and run off the CPU. If, you know for sure this sound/audio/CPU load is what is causing you the lockup periods, then I would avoid USB like the plague. I would avoid USB anyway because of my experiences (frame rate stutters and lockups).However, if you already know that communications cover up aircraft/sim sounds then I guess you could run two sound cards at the same time. I haven't ever thought about that (if you do that let me know how it works out). I am gaining more and more interest in this online adventure you engage in.

[WebMaximus 372]

Sorry, haven't had the time for any flying the last couple of days so haven't tried without sound yet.Right now I feel far too much time has gone into troubleshooting and I'm very eager getting up in the air and continue on my IVAO IFR World Tour so I think I will just plug my new soundcard in now and keep my fingers crossed ;-)As for the headset despite what you've said I think I will after some serious thought re-enable my onboard soundcard and then connect the headset to that one. Reason I will do so is that I do want the voice comm (over TeamSpeak) separated from the in-game sound in FSX and I came to the conclusion that when choosing between two bad things re-enabling my integrated soundcard will be less bad than going for a USB headset when looking at the load on my CPU.Also I belive my integrated soundcard maybe isn't that bad after all since my motherboard is a real performance card built for speed and gaming in mind and someone who asked the same thing about CPU load caused by the integrated soundcard in another forum got the answer that probably ASUS wouldn't want to include a soundcard on one of their top-performance motherboards that would degrade the overall performance and that makes sense to me. You can have a look at the motherboard I'm using here -> http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=...889&modelmenu=1Part from this I've done some other things as well now like switching to 'Best performance' in Vista for visuals...feels abit naked but I'm more interested in performance and stability than pretty colors ;-) and I also noticed there was a later version of IvAp I wasn't aware of so I totally cleaned out the old version and installed the new version.With some luck I might get time for a short flight later tonight, otherwise I think I will have the time for it tomorrow and belive me I'm looking forward both trying my new soundcard but most of all see if I still have the problem in FSX because it feels like I've changed pretty much now so maybe just maybe the problem will be gone...always see the sun behind those clouds right ;-)!?

[WebMaximus 372]

Sure Marten, already did this over at the IvAp FSX support forum at IVAO - here it is:This is my HW setupASUS Maximus Formula motherboardIntel Core2 Quad6600eVGA 8800GT SSC Edition4 GB Corsair Dominator 2048MB DDR2 XMS2-8500 1066MHz (5-5-5-15) (TWIN2X2048-8500C5D) RAM2 x Raid1 disk arrays based on SATA2 HDDsAs for the software I'm runningWindows Vista Ultimate 64-bit with SP1FSX Deluxe with SP2ActiveSky X (have tried without using it but problem remains)FS RealTime (have tried without using it but problem remains)FSDiscover!FsGenesis World wide meshFSUIPC ver 4.30Ground Environment XShockwave 3D Lights Redux (have tried without using it but problem remains)Ultimate Terrain X Europe and USA/Canada

[A36 Apache 0]

If you're talking about the SupremeFX II sound system it puts 100% of its sound processing onto your CPU and no it's not that good either. I understand what you want to do and now you have me wanting a second BGears card myself. If you had this and a low end XiFi card then I understand what the problem was and yes this probably killed you due to CPU overload and shared IRQs (just a thought though without hands-on exposure).Still, I hope your flight works out well and you have good news.

[WebMaximus 372]

I'm afraid the real online test flight won't be until tomorrow but what I've done so far is to upgrade my BIOS to the latest version and I also downloaded the latest audio drivers for the SupremeFX II however Windows Vista obviously already had it's own drivers because I got sound in my headset at the first logon without even any popups of new hardware found and must say that the sound in my headset is currently VERY good. Just launched FSX with the default Cessna a/c, started the engines and listened both in internal and external view and if I would have closed my eyes I could have imagined I was actually there for real! Guess part of this WOW feeling is that I usually never listen to the in-game sounds in FSX using my headset and you do get much "closer" using a headset compared to your normal speakers.Well...back to the CPU load question...too bad you're saying that this SupremeFX II will load my CPU with 100%...was hoping maybe this card wasn't that bad after all. One thing though, would it be possible to see how much CPU time this soundcard actually eats using Task Manager? I tried this but I couldn't see any other process except for FSX that was loading the CPU heavily - when I was just still in external view with the engine running FSX took about 20-30% CPU and when panning around it would go up to about 70-80% after a couple of seconds if I kept panning around. If this soundcard would have loaded my CPU heavily wouldn't I have seen that in some kind of process in Task Manager?Below is a screenshot of what Task Manager looked like when doing this test.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/194765.jpg

[A36 Apache 0]

I don't think that the audio stream is discernible with the process manager. I think something like RightMark ( http://audio.rightmark.org/products/rm3ds.shtml ) is what you want.I can tell you that I see an awful lot of things that are stealing memory and frames from you (Java Update Scheduler, Memeo, task scheduler...), which you can always shut down for the periods you are running FSX. Have you ever tried AlacrityPC? I used it for quite a while and then finally shut down what I never need and just start TrackIR and FRAPS myself before starting FSX, which works for me.

[WebMaximus 372]

Downloaded and tried RightMark but I'm not quite sure how you find out the load your soundcard puts on the CPU?Checked out AlacrityPC and seems like a good tool, I've used a similar utility some years ago but can't remember it's name right now. Reason I stopped using it was I very often got problems after a session where the things having been quit were not restarted again in a proper way forcing me to reboot my PC and I got tired of that but maybe this utility works better. Maybe I'll give it a try but I'm still far from convinced the culprit here is limited resources...I think it's more about a strange combination of different things and if you are the unlucky one having all those pieces and in their right (wrong) spots you will get this problem.I've said it before and I say it again, if the problem was caused by something as general as too high CPU load or reaching some memory limit then I think many more would have reported the same problem and usually when FSX reaches some kind of resource limit it will either tell you so or crash with some kind of error message but in this case it doesn't crash or even give you a single message...it just freezes for a couple of minutes and then carries on like nothing happened.Have to call it quits for tonight now but I hope I will be able to do some test flying online tomorrow with my new sound card installed and if I still have the problem I will again try to disable my onboard soundcard and then do another flight and see if it makes any difference. And if not I can just for the fun of it quit every running application/process that mustn't be running and perform yet another flight and then...puh!!...this issue is really killing me ;-)!!!

[A36 Apache 0]

Sometimes we expect too much from these computers we play with and we have to be careful not to load them down with too much overhead. If we expect them to be 'do-everything' systems then they can't do any one thing well. So, we should decide if we want to use them for games, or multimedia, or programming, or whatever. You can still have all of them, but you are better off creating separate boot environments for each, so that you don't have conflicts. Just a thought.

[WebMaximus 372]

You do have a point in what you say and if I keep getting this problem after my tests tomorrow I'll give that AlacrityPC utility a chance and see if it helps to create a pure FSX profile with nothing running more than the most necessary.

[Guest abulaafia]

you are right about your doubts re CPU load. sound is unlikely to have anything to do with this. if we both are observing the same error, you will notice that FSX always hangs with one core 100% and the other three empty. It is far more likely that something is causing the core scheduling of the scenery loading process to be stalled. As for the troubleshooting: the only thing our PCs have in common apart from the obvious is ActiveX. I will not install that again. Two troubleshooting questions:Do you have any custom AFCADS installed? What defragmentation program do you use?Are your HDs ACHI configured or normal IDE? (see BIOS)Here are some observations from my rig noted over the summer: - error only occurs at high altitudes, never on the ground- error occurs anywhere in the world, with any type of aircraft- sim always hangs with 1 core 100%, 3 cores no load- sim recovers in irregular intervals (shortest 20 seconds, longest several minutes)- Event Viewer shows "FSX failed to respond" only after I shut down FSX through Task manager, otherwise no entry- Process Monitor logs show no obvious communality between events- Problem occurs with and without overclocking - FS9 and X-Plane run on same PC with absolutely no problemAnd by the way, we are NOT the only ones with the problem. Google "FSX not responding" and you see countless threads. Incidentally, before switching to this motherboard I had a P5E3 for a short while. On that board FSX would occasionally hang for 20-30 seconds with heavy sound stuttering. Never figured out the problem, and then my daughter poured apple juice over the PC ... :) that solved it!

[A36 Apache 0]

I think you fail to consider shared IRQs. Sound and video will very commonly share IRQs and that in combination with CPU load can present difficult problems.

[Guest abulaafia]

Apparently there is an IRQ problem with nvidia and certain sound cards, yes. Maybe worth checking ... although IRQ sharing shouldn't be an issue with Vista.

[A36 Apache 0]

I was about to respond to your original posting...Yes, shouldn't be a problem with Vista, but just recently I saw a nasty conflict with a SB Live 5.1 card that brings shivers to my spine to think of the problems it presented.

[Guest abulaafia]

I found some threads on the nvidia site about very similar problems in other games. It does make sense, since the game is not crashing and sound loops throughout the hang. I called Asus after that and they told me always to install the driver from their website and never use the default Vista sound driver. Well, what else would they say. We'll see. If the problem returns, I will disable the sound card of the MB (Supreme FX II)