Earlier today a user posted a severe problem during a flight from KORD to KATL. Towards the end of the flight, the FPS dropped to about 2 or 3 seconds per frame making MSFS unusable. The user provided enough info about the flight for me to try it. I encountered the same performance drop near the same place. My screen was updating like a slow slide show. The decrease in FPS was almost instantaneous, no earlier FPS degradation.
I’m seeing many posts describing the poor performance since the update…
I’ve collected Windows performance information capturing about 30 seconds of activity. I’ve submitted everything I found to Zendesk with “Urgent” at the top. This problem needs an immediate fix! Can the moderators help escalate this?
If you are interested here are some of the details I found.
Task Manager showed flightsimulator.exe (MSFS) continually allocating memory. In other words a “memory leak” because MSFS was not freeing up any memory. The Working Set memory was increasing as well as Page Faults.
Looking at the Peformance Monitor and filtering it for MSFS, I saw that disk usage was high and the file with the highest byte count was c:\pagefile reading and writing about 4 to 8 Mb/sec. This is why the FPS dropped so quickly and dramatically. As the memory leak grew, all RAM was filled so Windows started allocating virtual memory which it is supposed to do. But the memory leak was growing faster than Windows could allocate more virtual memory. Windows started thrashing which means that it was using all of its resources to move memory pages back and forth from RAM and virtual memory. Very little resources were available for anything else. MSFS frame rate dropped because the thrashing was consuming everything.
I used some Windows tools to collect about 30 seconds of information while the FPS was so poor. The poor performance continued after stopping the flight and until I exited MSFS. I rebooted my PC to initialize the RAM and virtual storage.
I have not been able to perform an in-depth analysis on the performance data I collected. However, I found a stack trace showing one particular dll recursively calling itself. This could be the source of the memory leak. This is only speculation since I do not have access to the source code (obviously). All of this info was given to ZenDesk including the name of the suspicious dll.
If this memory leak is causing performance problems for everyone, the amount of time available to fly before performance tanks is determined by the amount of RAM that is installed. I had been flying for about two hours before the thrashing started. If everyone is having this problem, an immediate fix is needed!
I’ll post any info I receive from Zendesk, Asobo, or MS.