Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler - feelThere E-jets and 737 absolutely unfly-able past 20 minutes

Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler | PC Support | feelThere E-jets and 737 absolutely unfly-able past 20 minutes

DVA11836
Captain, B747-400
OLP

Joined on November 25 2013

"Wait, this plane is actually intelligent?"
Kitchener, ON Canada

80 legs, 222.7 hours
74 legs, 215.8 hours online
78 legs, 213.6 hours ACARS
2,132 legs, 3,717.2 hours total

Posted onPost created on May 01 2014 13:20 ET by Ethan Fortier

Hello,

So recently, I've been giving the E jets and the v2 series from feelThere a shot, and the plane is great (except for a few things here and there which I can put up with, like bobbing up and down on descent uncontrollably), but for some reason about 20-30 minutes in, my frame rate would go from 15-20 (average for me) to 0.1 or 0.3. Totally independent of the stage of flight, it would just behave in this manner and everything in the flight would come to a grinding halt. I could be sitting on the tarmac, just messing about, or I could be in climb, and it would just do that. So I did what any normal human being would do and gave the Wilco 737 a try, an addon I bought about 3-4 years ago and was working quite well until the last time I gave it a go (back in December), and the same issue seems to plague it. Surprisingly, though, the Airbus series is totally clear of that issue, been sitting on the tarmac for 2 good hours and no problems as of yet, and so are countless other addon aircraft.

I DO have to say, though, there was ONE instance when the E170 didn't suffer that issue for a good 2 hours before I ended the flight, having arrived, and I don't recall anything different that I did.

I'm considering it's some sort of bottleneck, but even then I'm totally unfamiliar with this issue and contacting support yields no replies. Would anyone have any idea as to what is going on with this or where I can start looking?

Ethan Fortier

Captain, B747-400

DVA4229
First Officer, B767-300
OLP

Joined on March 19 2007

"Sink rate. Sink Rate."
Southeastern United States

54 legs, 100.9 hours
47 legs, 87.7 hours online
53 legs, 98.4 hours ACARS
7 legs, 11.9 hours event

Posted onPost created on May 01 2014 13:54 ET by Lawrence Woodworth

I would suspect there's another application running in the background taking resources. After x number of minutes the resources taken start to impact your game. If you have an LED indicator for hard drive activity, see if it stays on solidly once the slow-down happens. This would indicate your computer has entered constant page-swapping - an good indication that most of your resources (read: "available memory") have been gobbled up.

Lawrence Woodworth (DVA4229)

DVA11957
Captain, MD-11
OLP

Joined on February 02 2014
DVA One-Year Anniversary
Double Century Club
Online Double Century Club
Everett Century Club
Events Century Club

"Fly everything, it never hurts."
Centereach, NY

290 legs, 843.0 hours
256 legs, 779.3 hours online
276 legs, 797.1 hours ACARS
117 legs, 260.7 hours event

Posted onPost created on May 01 2014 14:31 ET by Darren Tung

This is what happens to the fleet 747 which for some reason will not load on my system.

Darren Tung

Captain, MD-11

Posted onPost created on May 01 2014 15:52 ET by Ethan Fortier

Lawrence, I'm having a look at that right now, will keep you posted. But I really am curious, why just those aircraft?

The only things in my installation that could have changed was my Kaspersky Antivirus license expiring and multiple C++ Redistributable installations (for other games) taking place.

One thing that occurred to me is that the Airbus starts "Ready for push and start," while the other 3 addons were set to start cold and dark, so I've changed the ERJ 170 to start ready for p/s and I'll be seeing how it goes from there. If it doesn't change, I'll see what's going on in the task manager and subsequently kill Kaspersky, then I'll see how it goes from there on.

Ethan Fortier

Captain, B747-400

DVA10792
Captain, A320
OLP

Joined on June 07 2012
50 State Club
Globetrotter
Events Century Club
DVA Ten-Year Anniversary
Online Quintuple Century Club
Toulouse 500 Club
Six Century Club

Minneapolis, MN

613 legs, 1,281.0 hours
572 legs, 1,212.0 hours online
607 legs, 1,268.5 hours ACARS
159 legs, 262.9 hours event

Posted onPost created on May 01 2014 16:22 ET by Michael Levin

Lawrence Woodworth wrote:

I would suspect there's another application running in the background taking resources. After x number of minutes the resources taken start to impact your game. If you have an LED indicator for hard drive activity, see if it stays on solidly once the slow-down happens.

To expand on this, after FS experiences low frame rates, open task manager to check the following:

1) total CPU usage
2) total memory usage
3) CPU usage sorted by process
4) memory usage sorted by process

Edit: Some of Wilco's add-ons come packaged with other bonuses such as Call! - you might want to check whether one of those was installed, and if so, whether it's consuming system resources.

Michael Levin

Captain, A320

Posted onPost created on May 01 2014 16:54 ET by Ethan Fortier

Thank you for the responses, guys.

I tried it with the engines ready to start setting, and the problem did not occur this time. I'm about 40 minutes in, and there seem to be no issues. Framerate is about average at 15-20, 30 at times due to the high altitude the aircraft is at. I'll be trying with the 737 in a moment from cold and dark and will keep you posted once again.

I'm starting to imagine it's Kaspersky, since I know for a fact that feelThere's aircraft usually start from a running state as soon as you start a flight and then almost immediately the panel and aircraft state turns to cold and dark, so I'm wondering there's some line of code that says "interfere with FSX in some manner" that sets off a few bells and whistles in Kaspersky itself which causes it to interfere with FSX approximately 20 minutes too late. Even then, the timing is ridiculous on that.

EDIT: I should probably add that the issue occurred instantaneously (15-20 down to 0.1-0.3 within a fraction of a second) everytime I've witnessed it directly, as opposed to grabbing a glass of water and coming back to find it in that state.

Ethan Fortier

Captain, B747-400

Posted onPost created on May 01 2014 17:46 ET by Ethan Fortier

I'm back again, and the feelThere 737 has performed rather well, with no freezes anywhere in the short flight it was on, and that was with the start at cold and dark. I'll be reassigning the start for the E jet to cold and dark and I'll try taking it for a short flight.

Ethan Fortier

Captain, B747-400

Posted onPost created on May 01 2014 19:13 ET by Lawrence Woodworth

Ethan Fortier wrote:

Lawrence, I'm having a look at that right now, will keep you posted. But I really am curious, why just those aircraft?

Different add-on aircraft have different impacts on your available memory. The PMDG series I have is pretty rough on system resources because they've added so much into the aircraft systems. Where your aircraft in the past could run fine, something could have been added in the meantime that dropped resources below what those aircraft need for complete flights.

Lawrence Woodworth (DVA4229)

Posted onPost created on May 02 2014 10:56 ET by Ethan Fortier

And here's an extra update, FINALLY managed to get the problem to occur again. The Hard Drive R/W LED stayed on solid during that phase as you were expecting. I tried killing Kaspersky, and it helped slightly, but not enough to tell for sure that it was a root cause.

EVENTUALLY, FSX started jumping between 0.2FPS and 15FPS, and a few moments later, a message box popped up saying "Failed to read from file". The title of the message box was just "Microsoft Flight Simulator." Hitting the OK button just absolutely shuts FSX down.

Hints, anyone?

The feelthere isn't really as resource intensive as the CS 757, which I've seen run at about 8FPS on this computer in a stable manner, and even then that doesn't happen to it, nor with the CS 777. I'm starting to get a feeling there's something shared by the 737 and E jets that's causing this, something that the CS 757 does not rely on.

Ethan Fortier

Captain, B747-400

DVA9716
First Officer, A330-300

Joined on April 26 2011
50 State Club
Century Club
Online Century Club
DVA Ten-Year Anniversary

"Take Offs are optional - Landing are mandatory!"
Killeen, TX USA

154 legs, 324.0 hours
102 legs, 218.1 hours online
153 legs, 321.7 hours ACARS
4 legs, 8.9 hours event

Posted onPost created on May 02 2014 11:44 ET by Kenneth Dickerson

I have all the wilco except the 737, never had that issue. First uninstall your virus protection, reboot and try a run. If no issues then try AVG (free version), me I am a believer in BITDEFENDER.

Kenneth Dickerson

First Officer, A330-300

Posted onPost created on May 02 2014 14:24 ET by Ethan Fortier

Back in, Kaspersky Internet Security 2013 is no longer on this machine, and a trial run is incoming within the hour.

EDIT: 28 minutes in and we have no issues so far. I'm relying on the windows firewall, but I really only torrent or go to sketchy websites very rarely, if at all, so I think I can live without an AVP until I get a new PC. I'll try to get it to fail over the next few days, and if it doesn't occur again, then it's a problem solved. If not, I'm going to start asking around for an FSX "Task manager" to see what gauges and what dll's are running and at what demand so I can figure out where the bottlenecking really is.

Ethan Fortier

Captain, B747-400

Posted onPost created on May 02 2014 17:06 ET by Ethan Fortier

And I'm back from the 4th successful flight. Everything seems to be in order as of now. I will keep you all posted if it arises again, which I'm honestly expecting to happen when I shut this computer down, but until then, thank you so much, guys.

Ethan Fortier

Captain, B747-400

Posted onPost created on May 02 2014 17:45 ET by Kenneth Dickerson

Hope it works out. I have had too many issues with Norton and Kasper, I think they over engineer themselves to the point it is ljust not worth if after a point. Again, not selling it but BitDefender is what I have and it does really well!

Kenneth Dickerson

First Officer, A330-300

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