Solution for Stutters & Pauses (updated for SU5)

I have random “2 seconds pause, 1 second run, 2 seconds pause”. My world freezes while everything else advances about 5 seconds. Is that what you’re experiencing?

Well. See post, immediately above this. You’re the first person who’s having exactly the same issue. I’ll give it a try.

This is a MUST READ!! article for people having limited by main thread stutters. So many people have encountered CPU based stutters due to systems out of balance. The article lays everything out perfectly.

have you this sentence within your “Clipboard” ? :joy:

I flew over Tokyo… Around the whole route RJSS - RJTT I had one single short hicks under a second and this was before first-landing-try ( 2x “go around” ).
The route was former not in cache.

By the way… my 30gig “rolling cache” lies on a second ssd… But there is a huge discussion thread about “disable or not disable the cache”.

EDIT: corrected hdd → ssd ( to be exact :wink: )

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Actually this makes complete sense to me, but I might be entirely wrong too.

If the simulator is having a burst load of assets from the game folder, while at the same time it is trying to cache-in or cache-out scenery data, you can reach a contention state limiting overall I/O. Having 2 separate drives each one on its own SATA line might give more throughput and more importantly eliminate BUS I/O contentions.

From my understanding, some SATA lanes depend on the PCIe lanes, and some of them are straight from the CPU, others from the chipset. In mixing the two appropriately with 2 drives there is a chance some systems are exhibiting better disk performance under heavy contention.

I’m thinking about this because of this peculiar bug affecting my test system for which I’ve found no reference online at all, and spent many hours to try finding the root cause and the cure:

PSA: Solution to HDD and NVidia causing Win10 System Halt with Black Screen

TL;DR: waking up the HDD was taking enough seconds to freeze the mouse and making the NVidia card failing, forcing a hard reboot.

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I also got betterment from moving the rol cash to a different SSD.

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The use of SSDs, improved disk controllers, mobos, and improved CPU architecture is to move data as fast as possible to where it is needed. Faster components SHOULD reduce or eliminate contention. But the faster everything runs, timing becomes more critical. Problems may occur if manufacturers become sloppy with their tolerances. Similar components from different manufacturers are not necessarily the same quality. If there is contention, it might be difficult to determine if it happens with certain manufacturers.

Also, contention could be caused by Windows 10. It has to be fast enough to get the maximum performance from newer components while maintaining legacy compatibility. Physical disks are formatted based on their hardware. Has NTFS been updated and optimized for SSDs and the newest disk controllers? Just asking for a friend.:grinning:

This is exactly what I was wondering with the black screen of death with the NVidia. I find it strange my Win10 goes to a complete frozen state during the time the HDD is waking up. I still don’t know if this is a chipset problem, a Win10 problem, a Win10 driver problem, a SATA bus problem, but the fact of the matter is the mouse frozen and every other window not updating their content (as far as I can tell). The cure I’ve documented in the aforementioned post doesn’t get rid of the freeze, but at least doesn’t make the whole system halt to black screen.

That is basically what I was getting, like 2 or 3 seconds pause, fly 2 seconds, pause 2 or 3 seconds… that’s aside from the very very slight micro-stutters now and then. The micro stutters I could live with until I find a way to eliminate them but the pauses were a real pain. As I say moving the rolling cache seems to have eliminated it for me, I do have write caching turned on for the drives in Windows 10, but don’t have write cache buffer flushing turned off (safer). I have tweaked the graphics settings as well based upon a guide I think I found near the start of this thread, but I did that first and the long pauses were still happening, which is why I started thinking about disk I/O

I’ve had rolling cache off for months. I seldom fly over the same area more than once. Oddly, mine have quit in the last few days. Late last week my PC lost the ability to see DNS. I spent a couple of days touching every control I could think of. The box dual boots to Linux and that side worked. Not hardware, but put in new nic to no avail.
It started working again after I un-installed both AVG and the onboard nic, and rebooted. It could have been either of those things, but it’s working better than it ever has and I’m reluctant to fiddle around.

Well, in a bit of an update, it seems the long pauses are back. To be fair, I was flying without rebooting the PC all day, used for work, then some photoshop, then into MSFS. It was fine continuing a leg of a bush trip I’m doing, then fine flying the Eurofighter Typhoon from Lossie to Biggin Hill, but it started pausing when I then decided to fly the Icon A5 over the part of London where I grew up… so I’m unsure about the rolling cache, I do think it helps, but not sure why it decided to stall, unless it’s had enough and decided it needs a reboot!

I reboot several times a day. It’s the only way to be sure.

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I had the same issue for me sometimes it works for me I’ll get 2 min of no pause then pause. Could also be 4 min of gameplay then pause I found out today that if I turn on my headset it does the same pause I’ve been using Msi afterburner to see the gpu get affected could be a new driver from nvidia causing the issue in my opinion so I’ll have to check that out. Also switching my headset from stereo to surround sound will pause the game so at this point I’m lost but who knows this thread is deff staying busy and becoming a developer xD (edited comment) downloaded old drivers no luck I’m lost devs we need help lmao ( and no it’s not just in game it will pause at the menus)

So now we all have to go back to HDD’s in order to
make MSFS run properly? That is ridiculous…

I’m not sure this is what I’m talking about though, rather, I’m suggesting maybe using 2 drives (NVME, SSD, HDD, Floppy - must be large though) could help if and only if the problem is rooted to the SATA bus contention and/or the number of simultaneous I/O on a single SATA bus.

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Having the same issue with the 2 second pauses.
Oddly enough this only started happening when I upgraded from a 1070 to a 3070 2 days ago.

FPS itself is stable around 40 but every 2-3 minutes I have a 2 sec pause.
The pauses even happen if I open the pause menu and leave it open.

Here’s an image of the performance monitor just after a pause Microsoft Flight Simulator - 1.12.13.0 (gyazo.com)

Not sure what the deal is with it but I reset my Nvidia control panel and flight sim setting and I thought it fixed it but I guess it didn’t hopefully this can be resolved soon if your on the most recent drivers I’d go back one apparently the new Nvidia drivers a trash

as you can see the fast stutters down to 0 on the left side

I’m not an expert but the graphs seem to be indicating a sudden drop of traffic between the video card and the system (bus usage) along with a drop of the core clock at the same time the GPU usage is dropping to 0.

Could this be something on the PCIe controller? Do you have any SATA drive connected to the CPU PCIe lines shared with the Video Card? What about plugging the drives to the SATA bus connected to the MB chipset instead?

See for example:
PCIe Lanes and Their Importance - Logical Increments Blog
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6123ad/help_me_understand_pcie_and_sata_lanes/

Having pauses since the last (US II) update, and when it happens, it could be in 2D or VR, but it starts as a flicker, then a stutter, then an absolute “freeze”/“pause”…which eventually recovers, but, resets the propeller to the “0” position, and sometimes does the same to the throttle (but not always).

It seems to happen early into a flight more often, and the longer I fly, the less it occurs. It also seems to happen more when passing from one “tile” to another, so I have a feeling it has something to do with the data throroughput from the servers and maps to my computer and vice versa…

It really sucks with the immersion. I have tried every single thing to fix, but it still happens, unexpectedly, most of the time.

Would love to find a def. answer. This is a beautiful sim, and I am still enjoying it, despite this!

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