What really stood out to me was the CTD related to accelerated sim rate or slewing.
In troubleshooting a number of CTD scenarios, we always make sure of some very specific things that usually solve the problem. There are a lot of users using accelerated rate enroute, but I have never asked the ones we have been having trouble solving. I think you just added another step to the flowchart. Thank-you for that.
The cpu spikes also bring up some interesting questions.
And you are 100% on the network hiccups. I am becoming more and more convinced the many of the random CTDs are related to network dropouts.
I did some tests a month before, same low deatail terrain issues causing memory problems
At first I though it was from messing with the LOD
11-09 Cazombo FNCZ 4:05 AM
Lockup trying out Terrain LOD at 4.0, very slow until game locks up, restart
It was devmode that locked up while trying to figure out if performance was memory related (GPU < 20% utilized)
Dev mode still active and wonāt turn off fps counter, restart again
11-09 Cazombo FNCZ 4:39 AM
Terrible performance still < 10 fps, CTD / lockup, screen went all black, restart
11-09 Cazombo FNCZ 5:06 AM
CTD again tried to use slew mode to skip back to where I was, restart everything
11-09 Cazombo FNCZ 5:19 AM Flying high to avoid another CTD
11-09 Lumeje FNLM 6:11 AM
The first CTD was probably from the higher than max LOD, although the terrain there has issues as well. Then I used rate increase to get back to where I was, and then slew mode, creating more CTDs. Last I simply went up high and not touch anything.
I tried that specific flight again later to pin the problem down
Retesting the first leg under clear weather conditions with my regular settings. It gets very slow 2fps, then CTD (Auto pilot, sim rate one notch faster than regular speed) Second attempt with little nav map tracking, crashed at 11 42ā 48.79" S, 21 44ā 30.67" E
*Third attempt at regular speed, made it this time, slow enough not to cause trouble. * The higher LOD factor must have overstressed the system, however Iāve done tests at faster speeds before without issues. Fourth attempt with a faster plane, slow down into CTD again
Using a jet, flying twice as fast had the same effect as sim rate increase. When the sim falls behind in streaming, in this case made worse by buggy terrain, chances of a crash increase.
On the vcruntime topic try to de-install all runtime installations in win ā> settings ā> apps, reboot and the just re-install the very latest x64 and x86 runtimes from Microsoft website. I had maaany CTDs especially after simupdate 2 but none since I followed above steps.
To be on the safe side, I also deactivated AI traffic, live traffic and multiplayer. Only using live weather and primarily the custom modded neo
From having 3 CTDās in 6 months, Iāve now had 3 in one weekā¦ and 2 today alone.
The first recent one was right on loading the flight, pressed the READY TO FLY and CTD. I logged that to Zendesk (with error logs) and they got back to me fairly quickly and told me to empty my community folder. (The logs actually listed a DLL file) Ok, Done.
I had been flying with AI Traffic OFF, as I thought that may have been attributing to the stuttering and CTD problem. But that CTD occurred with AI off so, naturally I turned AI back on.
That was 2 days ago, I completed a few short flights under 1 hour no problem.
Then today, both in the C172, first CTD 20 or so minutes into the flight, second CTD about 40 mins in.
I was running the resource monitor during the second one:
First the network usage spikes, then disk usage, then memory hard faults (from google - A hard fault occurs when a memory block had to be retrieved from the Page File (Virtual Memory ) instead of the physical memory (RAM )
Iām just really interested to see what is actually happening ābehind the scenesā if you will when MSFS has a CTD.
One thing I did notice is that FS.exe was using 14,000,000KB of memory in the ācommitā column which is Virtual RAM. That is more than half the value of Physical RAM being used. Compared to all the other apps, for the amount of memory being used none of them use anywhere near the % FS uses.
After Restarting the sim, I turned AI off AGAIN and completed the flight, ran Smooth with little or no stuttering. I will continue to have AI off, and see what happens
and you forgot the mention the second part of the quote:
Because of this, hard faults should not be looked upon as error conditions. However, an excessive number of hard faults is usually a good indicator that the machine in question needs more physical memory (RAM).
I donāt get this sim, more bizarre events last night.
At some point it started stuttering really bad, seemingly on a timer. It wasnāt long after I had lost internet connection, restored it and reconnected in the sim. It looked like everything was streaming normally again and then the odd stuttering started. Run for .5 sec, then pause .3 sec, run .1 sec, pause .1 sec and repeat. I landed at the next airstrip to restart, the instant my wheels touched the ground the stuttering was completely gone. I restarted anyway to make sure and no more issues. The memory usage was nothing outrageous, 6.1 GB in use.
I guess another case of streaming having fallen behind causing problems. It didnāt crash though!
If I were having these problems I would try turning the settings down to low-end. Try running at a lower resolution. Turn all air, sea and land traffic off.
I had one between game launch and last patch and since I had two in two flights. The first one I was at the gate so no harm no foul but the last one just occurred today after 3h13 of flight and I was 30 Nm away from landing. All that precious time wasted.
I had two while flying the Carenado PA44 after the latest sim update on 12/22, and havenāt had any more since. I have no idea what the issue was. I was just flying along andā¦ poof. I wasnāt clicking anything or doing anything weird.
I know my KASH scenery was causing CTDās a few versions ago, but, I reported it and Asobo fixed it in the November update.
I used to get them after long flights, as many others here. Once the fix came out a few months ago (sorry, canāt remember which one) they stopped. The only time I get them now is when I install a 3rd party plugin that causes a problem OR I get bold and set my PC or VR settings too high.
Apart from the press V to CTD bug, iāve had 1 since the near start of Alpha. Guess Iām lucky, but have a powerful PC. Not sure if that makes a difference.
That makes a huge difference. I think many unexplained CTDs are caused by people either trying to overclock more than their systems can handle, or simply trying to run the sim on settings that their systems canāt handle. The problem with those kinds of problems, though, is that they can be mighty difficult to track down to a single cause to fix.
I mean if youāve overclocked your GPU, and itās 99.9% stable, how do you then make the connection between that 0.1% unstable GPU, and the random CTD you get once or twice a month? Not easy to do. Even if you suspect that might be the root cause, how do you design an experiment to reliably determine if youāre right or not?
EDIT: Especially when so many people would rather throw shade on Asobo for a problem they had nothing to do with, rather than admitting that the problem is actually them. (The complainers, not Asoboā¦)
Mine have now completely stopped since switching AI Traffic off.
I donāt buy into the idea that crashes only happen to people with settings that their systems canāt handle in general.
My opinion is that there are badly optimised things in the sim which cause horrible spikes in memory or processing and some peopleās PCs are more able to cope than othersā¦ Which is where the powerful PC factor comes in. In the case of AI Traffic, my PC just couldnāt cope with it and ā¦ ā¦ ā¦
So, generalising and laying the blame on users with minimum spec is not really very fair. We know there are 45 quadrillion permutations of a PC system but minimum spec is minimum specā¦ Itās should run on that without spiking in performance and killing the processes. In my humblest opinion.
I have a very modest PC system, and so I run mine on mostly medium/modest settings and I get quite nice (good enough!) results from that. But I was still getting some crashes. Until I switched off anything in the SIM I thought was badly optimised (rolling cache, ai traffic, 3rd party plugins). Now itās sweet.
Now, if folks are over-clocking and running on silly settings unsuitable for their systems, then yeah, thatās a different thing like @KevyKevTPA points out.
Had 2 CTDs in the last day having had none since the USB issue was fixed back in August. Both are due to a small issue with Simconnect and Little Nav Map that the developer has just released a work around for already, which is great news.
I started getting them again just after the last updateā¦ I then did a reinstall of MSFS, and started using an addon linker for all my addons. This helps by isolating them unless i am using it in the flight.
So for example if i am flying from LOWS to EGKK I will only load those airports via the linker, and any scenary, Liveries , if required. Happy to say i have not had one CTD since.
And if i do, i will be able to isolate the offending addon, and remove it.
