[REPORTED] Dispair with disk activity causing stutter

I'm really struggling to find the casue of stutters distrupting motion every 5 - 10 seconds.

I can see disk activity peaks, which although relativly small coinside with stutters in game and they are only present when running DCS.

The game is installed on F: SSD and Windows is running on C: SSD

I have tried reducing/ increasing view distance, preload radius, removing USB hub, stopping Defender, turning off ethernet, increasing pagefile, turning off pagefile, running Cortex boost, uninstalled G Force experience, yet none cured it yet.

Any suggestions/ help please? :helpsmilie:

Check if you have one of these or both installed:

https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=263566

After the latest update I found a drop in performance and stutters as you describe. My malware detection software was causing the problem.

Check if you have one of these or both installed:

 

https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=263566

Not installed on mine but thankyou

After the latest update I found a drop in performance and stutters as you describe. My malware detection software was causing the problem.

Same with Defender and tried with Mcafee. Also done scan but no change.

Thank you though.

Try alt-enter ingame. This removed my 2-3sec micro stutters.

It seems to some sort of disk caching due terrain loading (not present in 2.5.5) moving camera in free view at high speed causes enormous stuttering and disk usage. It seems that memory is not quite well used.

In fact, if I hit CTRL+PAUSE, Video memory is 0MB.

Update - After many hours studying the Resource monitor it seems the culprit is DSC's own track recording. I have now set Tackview to false in the Options file and added an autoexec.cfg with "disable_write_track = true" and so far so good!:doh:

Update - After many hours studying the Resource monitor it seems the culprit is DSC's own track recording. I have now set Tackview to false in the Options file and added an autoexec.cfg with "disable_write_track = true" and so far so good!:doh:

Where do you find the options file with "tackview" false?

Where do you find the options file with "tackview" false?

Its under plugins in the options.lua file at C:\Users"yourname"\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Config.

I don't know whether it's the track recording or Tacview causing the problem for me so will investigate further.

Update - After many hours studying the Resource monitor it seems the culprit is DSC's own track recording. I have now set Tackview to false in the Options file and added an autoexec.cfg with "disable_write_track = true" and so far so good!:doh:

Nake, thanks for your efforts and your reports.

Do I understand correctly that "disable_write_track = true" disables DCS internal recording, and TACVIEW is another different part?

No worries :thumbup:

To my understanding so far, the disable track recording line "["tacviewDataRecordingEnabled"] = false, " in Options.lua just disables Tacview recording.

To disable in-game recording, I found to create a simple text file called autoexec.cfg and save in the same config folder. There was just one line in it as "disable_write_track = true".

No worries :thumbup:

 

To my understanding so far, the disable track recording line "["tacviewDataRecordingEnabled"] = false, " in Options.lua just disables Tacview recording.

 

[...]

Made a rollback to 2.5.5. tonight and thought I'd give it a try anyway and there you go. It is already set to false. So was that maybe changed to true in 2.5.6?

Hey guys, I have asked the team to take a look at this, I am not experiencing it myself, but worth check out, thanks for the report!

Many thanks and just to confirm for me its the in game track record causing the stutter.

With Tackview turned off, turning track record on causes the problem to return. I'm not sure what if anything has changed my end but it used to run perfectly smooth until I noticed this on Friday.

Interestingly, the problem also exists now when I use 2.5.3.24984 (For the Hawk).

I have attached a screen grab showing the file present when track record is active and high on the Write activity in Resource Monitor when 'System' is checked. (I'm sure this was saving into the Saved Games folder when I first saw it?).

I hope this info helps.

Hey guys, I have asked the team to take a look at this, I am not experiencing it myself, but worth check out, thanks for the report!

Thank, NL! :thumbup: Question: And I'm pretty confident the developers are, but... Is the team faithfully testing these new patches/tech implementations on low and medium class rigs? I just wonder if they're pushing out patches that run smooth as butter on their 9900k, 2080 TI, Saturn V booster, Space Warp driving computers that just aren't what the majority of us have or can afford in this era of good graphics cards being the price of a used car. When these patches drop on a lowly 1060 or 1070 owner, we're scratching our heads a bit.:)

Many thanks and just to confirm for me its the in game track record causing the stutter.

 

With Tackview turned off, turning track record on causes the problem to return. I'm not sure what if anything has changed my end but it used to run perfectly smooth until I noticed this on Friday.

 

Interestingly, the problem also exists now when I use 2.5.3.24984 (For the Hawk).

 

I have attached a screen grab showing the file present when track record is active and high on the Write activity in Resource Monitor when 'System' is checked. (I'm sure this was saving into the Saved Games folder when I first saw it?).

 

I hope this info helps.

Since this occurs on yours only, or a fraction of users, I would check:

1: The SSD DCS writes to is not near full, at least 20% available ( not marked red )

2: Your SSD is equipped with the newest Firmware ( always check with newest Samsung Magician only ), if NVMe, newest NVMe driver installed ?

3: You dont have other read/write issues on that SSD ( possibility of nearing SSD failure )

What does Samsung Magician say about the drive's health ?

Since this occurs on yours only, or a fraction of users, I would check:

 

1: The SSD DCS writes to is not near full, at least 20% available ( not marked red )

2: Your SSD is equipped with the newest Firmware ( always check with newest Samsung Magician only ), if NVMe, newest NVMe driver installed ?

3: You dont have other read/write issues on that SSD ( possibility of nearing SSD failure )

What does Samsung Magician say about the drive's health ?

Thanks for the info @BitMaster

Just to advise my C: drive where the game is saving to is a PNY SSD, whereas the game is installed on F: which is a Samsung SSD.

The PNY drive is new and only installed in December just gone but I did check health of all drives during fault finding here with Disk Sentinel which said all is 100%.

I think I checked driver status but will double check along with checking capacity. I have a suspicion it is quite full.

....... I have a suspicion it is quite full.

There you go :smilewink:

There you go :smilewink:

@BitMaster

Looks like I've got 87.7GB free out of 657GB. Its not showing as red in explorer, so not sure how that relates back or why it would effect writing of tracks?

87GB free of 657GB total is on the safe side.

Not the cause of your problem tho there is not much left until it becomes stuffed and thus will slow down and wear will increase. It all depends on how clever the controller manages the cells.

If the DCS is on another SSD, track write shouldn't be the problem because it's writing to the OS SSD.

I just came independently across one side of this thing thing, I'm doing vairous bug hunting and this is the next report I'll be posting today, but it probably is not limited to 2.5.6, it's a general thing with memory/disk/terrain loading.

We do test on lower-end machines, but sometimes it's tough to test every possible combo.

Thanks, NineLine!

Also, do you and Wags ever play/test in 4K? I'm just wondering if us 4K, 2D folks are not as common as the VR and 1080p Flat Screen crowd-testers?

Still writing the big post about my finding, it's not that special it was in front of our noses all the time tho so anyone could have figured it out, it has to become a new thread as it stands on it's own for other cases not just this one, I'll post the link here but it's going to be in the same forum section.

I'll give you guys a hint: it's a plot twist ;)