SU6
After flying for some time (in this case a test of 10 hours), MSFS has slowed down, and has both Audio & Video Stutter.
Returning to world map and entering new FP, improves things, but not nearly as much as Restarting the sim.
Do Asobo test long term stability - ie leave MSFS running overnight on AP flight and next morning, check what may be causing this degradation over time ?
The thing that jumps out at me is the Coherent GT Draw and Coherent GTUI Thread values after 10 hours !!
The cause of this should be discoverable running in Developers Debug Version ??
The issue is the the Video, and most annoyingly the Audio stutter, and slow down of the Video, jerky Mouse movement etc
FPS is also an issue,
The after 10 hours screen shot was a bad example, it’s FPS was varying between 40 & 14 FPS – I just happened to catch it at a high point !!
Turning Off Internet, MP, Bing, AI Traffic, etc ec, but none of those action made any difference to teh Audio stuttering, or the slow FPS.
Only thing that I found to restore original operation, was to re-start the sim.
(Even going back to World map did nor restore the original RE-STARTED smooth operation)
Note: 1080P system, 32GB ram, CPU memory up from initial 4GB to over 9GB after 10 hours
This is interesting. I routinely leave MSFS running on my computer. Sometimes it is due to an interruption resulting in a pause and walk away. If it was a VFR bush flight then I often come back and its now dark so I just pause and continue the flight the next day. Other times, I simply leave it on the menu because I still run off a HDD and it takes so darn long to load up. I have had it in the background while watching movies, doing video editing, or just about anything one would use the computer for.
I’ll bet that on average I will complete a dozen or so flights of varying distance, aircraft and flight rules, in a week or more between MSFS shut downs. In general the only time it gets shut down is when I have an update of some kind, either MSFS or another program. I will always do a reboot before and after any update.
I quite honestly have never noticed any drop off in performance or stability over time. I will maybe take a look at the system monitors at some point to see if there is something going on that I haven’t noticed, but I sure don’t see any indications.
I have seen significant performance drops for my flights over five to seven hours. When performance drops, MSFS is performing a massive download of scenery and object files unrelated to what and where I’m flying. The massive download consumes a huge amount of cpu, disk, and network resources. I have no idea what triggers the massive download.
I actually did my own test with the stock 152 on active pause for 8 hours over a photogrammetry city and suffered no fps loss. I’m not saying there isn’t memory leaks but you need to make controlled tests in specific circumstances.
It returns to “normal” if I have the patience to wait.
This happens with different aircraft and at different locations. I know that MSFS will download object and scenery files when approaching new areas or airports. These files are generally loaded into the rolling cache and then accessed from there. These downloads are smaller and have little or now impact on FPS.
These massive downloads don’t seem to be scenery or aircraft related because they have happened while flying over Antarctica where there are no aircraft or airports within any reasonable distance. Also, these files aren’t processed through the rolling cache. This appears to be more like maintenance or refresh performed by MSFS. Because of the amount of time involved it is difficult for me to schedule my time to troubleshoot this further.
The server/file streaming part is still a “black box” where we have had only a few glimpses of how the internals work. There has been a lot of discussions about the rolling cache such as location, size, and performance impact. But nothing about cache internals. Clearly it is sort of a MSFS ‘database’ having some sort of structure and organization. Databases need to have regular maintenance to operate efficiently. I’d love to know how MSFS ‘maintains’ the rolling cache for peak efficiency.
I’m trying to make a hypothetical link between specific times of poor performance and MSFS internals without any direct evidence; therefore, consider all this as my opinion only.
