My progress was to run resource monitor to see what was doing what, I noticed that my keyboard driver was chewing up bandwidth (icue). So I started removing all drivers from my win10 install. Removed keyboard, mouse, headphone drivers, network driver (intel).
Started adding them back one by one. iCue driver seemed to be causing issues, and started reading the web, and found other people had similar problems related to slow DL speeds on a fast connection. I new it wasnt the connection because I installed this on my laptop (almost a identical machine to my laptop) and it DL’d at 90-100 mbps. This is the point where I started uninstalling all drivers.
After I uninstalled everything, I uninstalled MSFS, searched the reg for any instances of MSFS and did the re-install of the sim. And voila … 90mpbs for the download.
Windows will use its own drivers for your machine (unless maybe you have something exotic). After I had that fixed, I started re-installing drivers 1 by 1 and running the sim after each install to see what effects it had.
My conclusions came to intel ethernet driver (no matter what version) gave me the 20 mbps download issue, iCue drivers were using way to many resources just to make the lights on the KB pretty. Other then that the rest of the drivers seemed to be okay.
I still get ‘micro’ stutters from time to time, but these seem to be related to server overload more then my machine, ie play at 6:00 am and I get 30-40 fps and smooth flight, as the 8:00 hour approaches things will start to slide downhill, and will recover after about 9:30. This later part tells me that its more a network issue then anything on my system. It will do the same thing as mention above around the time people start coming home from work (primetime) until around 19:20 hours.
If you think your ISP is throttling you can install a VPN and try running the sim with that active, I’ve heard that this will get around the throttling issue, dont know havent tried it.
The other thing to check, is you router logs, if your router does logging make sure its on, and make sure your not getting ddos’d. I changed out my router with a new high end one (before I figured out the ethernet driver issue) and discovered that I was getting DDOS messages constantly. I shut down the modem for an hour (to make sure I got a fresh ip) and checked again and the ddos messages dispappeared (I see them once in awhile still but the new router takes care of them). I then hooked up the old router, and everything was still good.
Sorry I might be rambling a bit but its still early and I havent finished my coffee yet.