DCS stuttering from high disk usage

[Gargoyle1]

Hey guys

 

So I have been jumping through hoops for quite some time now with DCS,

 

It. Always. Stutters.

 

BUT I think I have narrowed it down to one particular culprit, my © Drive

 

My system specs are as follows:

 

i7-7700k

RTX 2070 Super

32 GB DDR4 ram @ 2400MHz

2 TB HDD Drive (Regular DCS is installed on this, I only use open beta)

250 Gb SSD (DCS open beta is installed on this)

 

So it seems like even though I have 32Gb of RAM, Dcs is still using my hard disk drive in some way even though it is installed on an SSD. Heres the thing, before you mention pagefile, I have the pagefile set 10 1000mb to 1500 mb ON THE SSD. However even in singleplayer, I still get micro stutters because my C drive keeps hitting 100% for no apparent reason. The pagefile for the C drive is completely disabled, why would DCS be using the C drive for ANY reason?

 

any help is much appreciated! I have contacted support this week but we haven't gotten far yet, so I figured the community help would be the next steps.

 

Thanks!

-Gargoyle

[panton41]

Your page file is way, way too small. The general rule of thumb is 1) Just let Windows manage it and 2) Set it between 1.5x to 4x your system RAM (as in the upper and lower bounds on the settings page, which for you is between 48G and 128GB) with option 1 preferred for a vast majority of use cases for obvious reasons (lettings Windows manage it uses less).

 

The easiest way to put it is that the pagefile does quite a bit more than simply act as old-school virtual memory, though that is part of its use, and it's best to simply let the hivemind at Microsoft who wrote the operating system to determine what's best. Even if you have a lot of chip RAM, you'll lose performance by skimping on the pagefile.

 

Besides that, is your C-drive the SSD or the spinning rust?

 

Ideally, you install Windows itself to the SSD simply because that'll give you by far better performance for literally everything you do on the computer. (And that's been common advice ever since SSDs came into existence.) If not, then you've installed your operating system, and all of the files and caches it needs to run everything (including your games) on a technology that is, frankly, utterly obsolete in every category except price (and a handful of extremely niche archival purposes gamers won't care about). Simply put, if Windows itself is installed to the spinning rust drive the single best thing you can do for overall performance is reinstall Windows onto the SSD.

 

There's a good chance Windows itself is loading and caching files related to the game (or other things) onto the boot/system drive, which is orders of magnitude slower than the SSD.

Edited April 11, 2020 by panton41

[David OC]

Mine is set to

 

min size 32768

max size 32768

Set to E drive.

 

Make sure it's using an SSD for the page file, not the old mechanical drive.

Yep, having windows on an SSD or M.2 would help too. I run windows on the M.2 nvme just to be sure it has everything.

Edited April 11, 2020 by David OC

[panton41]

Apparently, after Googling the issue more, the proper amount of pagefile is open to lively discussion but in general you want to have one and have it fairly close to, if not higher, than your system RAM. I think the "rule of thumb" I listed above was for older systems with far less RAM than a typical modern gaming system

[Gargoyle1]

Your page file is way, way too small. The general rule of thumb is 1) Just let Windows manage it and 2) Set it between 1.5x to 4x your system RAM (as in the upper and lower bounds on the settings page, which for you is between 48G and 128GB) with option 1 preferred for a vast majority of use cases for obvious reasons (lettings Windows manage it uses less).

 

The easiest way to put it is that the pagefile does quite a bit more than simply act as old-school virtual memory, though that is part of its use, and it's best to simply let the hivemind at Microsoft who wrote the operating system to determine what's best. Even if you have a lot of chip RAM, you'll lose performance by skimping on the pagefile.

 

Besides that, is your C-drive the SSD or the spinning rust?

 

Ideally, you install Windows itself to the SSD simply because that'll give you by far better performance for literally everything you do on the computer. (And that's been common advice ever since SSDs came into existence.) If not, then you've installed your operating system, and all of the files and caches it needs to run everything (including your games) on a technology that is, frankly, utterly obsolete in every category except price (and a handful of extremely niche archival purposes gamers won't care about). Simply put, if Windows itself is installed to the spinning rust drive the single best thing you can do for overall performance is reinstall Windows onto the SSD.

 

There's a good chance Windows itself is loading and caching files related to the game (or other things) onto the boot/system drive, which is orders of magnitude slower than the SSD.

 

Unfortunately, my operating system is installed on the crap HDD drive and not the SSD. I am working on getting another SSD to completely move everything over. I will keep playing with the pagefile and update you guys with what I find! Thanks for the help everyone.

[Ironious]

Not so much stuttering but occasional pauses, sometimes for several seconds, can be caused by USB issues. You can correct that by creating an autoexec.cfg in your c:\users\<username>\saved games\<dcs folder>\config folder. The content of the autoexec.cfg is: no_device_hotplug = true

[MAXsenna]

Unfortunately, my operating system is installed on the crap HDD drive and not the SSD. I am working on getting another SSD to completely move everything over. I will keep playing with the pagefile and update you guys with what I find! Thanks for the help everyone.

Good for you!

Page file yeah?

Well, that's up for debate. I don't use one, haven't for 7 years. That's how old my rig is. Read a little about it and make your choice. Don't blindly follow advise. If you set it up as some suggest, it will eat up precious space from your SSD. IMHO with Windows 10 lots af RAM, SSD/M2, there is not really any need for a pagefile anymore, unless you somehow run too many apps at the same time, that'll spend all your RAM.

None of my Windows servers since 2012 R2 uses a pagefiles anymore either. They're all set to auto. It's there, but like 5-100MB.

Oh, while you're at it. Remember to turn off hibernation as well. With 32Gigs, it will take a 32Gig chunk off your SSD as well.

My 2 cents...

 

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[BitMaster]

Good for you!

Page file yeah?

Well, that's up for debate. I don't use one, haven't for 7 years. That's how old my rig is. Read a little about it and make your choice. Don't blindly follow advise. If you set it up as some suggest, it will eat up precious space from your SSD. IMHO with Windows 10 lots af RAM, SSD/M2, there is not really any need for a pagefile anymore, unless you somehow run too many apps at the same time, that'll spend all your RAM.

None of my Windows servers since 2012 R2 uses a pagefiles anymore either. They're all set to auto. It's there, but like 5-100MB.

Oh, while you're at it. Remember to turn off hibernation as well. With 32Gigs, it will take a 32Gig chunk off your SSD as well.

My 2 cents...

 

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You can try w/o PageFile, but as you say, I'd be cautious to follow your adevise, my own experience with DCS and 32GB shows me it still wants space to offload.

 

Hibernation is disabled by default in Win10Pro when you install it fresh from an original copy. Might differ with preinstalled 10 and notebooks. Never had that enabled by default on dozens of installs.

 

YMMV

Edited April 14, 2020 by BitMaster

[omskTransmash]

When DCS is installed in another drive,

DCS save folder is still in C: if untouched. for example, C:\users\username\saved games\dcs..

 

Problem is DCS read/writes into saved folders a lot from a lot of reasons, such as writing track files, read/write metashaders.. etc

 

I suggest you to move your DCS save folder to SSD. It's a little bit tricky but you can do it.

 

@I highly doubt that pagefile is the culprit. easy to prove with disabling page files altogether. 32GB should be no prob. at least for testing

[MAXsenna]

You can try w/o PageFile, but as you say, I'd be cautious to follow your adevise, my own experience with DCS and 32GB shows me it still wants space to offload.

 

Hehe! Good one! But yes, I was actually referring to my advice as well.

But what do you know!

For some strange reason I've actually have a system managed pagefile. Bloody 10GB!! Must have forgotten to turn it off after some testing. We'll, I'll test some more and turn it off. Luckily it was on my 4XSSD stripe set.

Silly me. Maybe I diserved that, but at least I'm honest. Chuckle...

 

 

Hibernation is disabled by default in Win10Pro when you install it fresh from an original copy. Might differ with preinstalled 10 and notebooks. Never had that enabled by default on dozens of installs.

YMMV

 

Hmmm... That's interesting! Could it be an Enterprise feature? As by default I mean.

Haven't "manually" installed Windows in a long time. Can't really remember when.

I tank everything with MDT/SCCM and I just run a test that checks if there's a battery or not to keep or disable.

 

Well, installed a bunch of blade workstations for a customer in 2012, that had 256 Gigs per standard. No pagefile there, I promise.

But do your homework. TEST, and test again!

Now back to the SC thread!

 

 

 

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[BitMaster]

IIRC, when I tested different PF settings ( maybe a year ago or so ), the one thing that stood out was exiting DCS gave problems and was slower than ever with no PF set.

 

You should keep in mind that many Pilots use a lot of additional apps along with DCS, like TiR, SRS, TS3, Discord, TacView, VR cpanel, ..... and last but not least maybe a browser.

 

You sure know, as an admin, that Win10 does a lot of stuff under the hood and if DCS is not marked as a Game in GameBar, many of those may or may not be started and executed while you fly.

Sometimes when I fly at 00:00h my Acronis kicks in and does a Backup, not really annoying, only a few glitches here and there but I can stay airborne ;)

 

What fires back more intense are cloud syncs for various services, iCloud Photo Sync, Google Drive, DropBox, etc etc...

 

Many many variables and the least you want is run out of computing power, many cores, speedy drives, fast ISP, LOTS of RAM...and a PageFile ;)

[MAXsenna]

IIRC, when I tested different PF settings ( maybe a year ago or so ), the one thing that stood out was exiting DCS gave problems and was slower than ever with no PF set.

 

You should keep in mind that many Pilots use a lot of additional apps along with DCS, like TiR, SRS, TS3, Discord, TacView, VR cpanel, ..... and last but not least maybe a browser.

 

You sure know, as an admin, that Win10 does a lot of stuff under the hood and if DCS is not marked as a Game in GameBar, many of those may or may not be started and executed while you fly.

Sometimes when I fly at 00:00h my Acronis kicks in and does a Backup, not really annoying, only a few glitches here and there but I can stay airborne ;)

 

What fires back more intense are cloud syncs for various services, iCloud Photo Sync, Google Drive, DropBox, etc etc...

 

Many many variables and the least you want is run out of computing power, many cores, speedy drives, fast ISP, LOTS of RAM...and a PageFile ;)

Hehe Absolutely! In a perfect world, we would run everything sandboxed/in VMs, except for games etc.

That way, it would be much easier for the casual user to distribute "power" to where it's needed.

Hell, 3 years ago. I used to have a 2,5 ton UPS at home, 2 full racks of stuff and full 10Gbps network between the servers. Gaming was run locally, everything else remote. That was the times, never mind the power bill...

 

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[BitMaster]

If there wasn't the power bill, LoL...I too have more IT here in stock than I want to pay electricity for :(

 

0.30€/kWh + tax etc..

[MAXsenna]

Hehe

Electricity is cheap here in Norway, but I still had 3000€/month

 

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