[Autosave causing micro-pauses in FS9?]

You could try disabling the regular cycle and use the "alsosave" facility only.

Actually that's all I use - I only need to recover the last position after a CTD on VATSIM flights, and I also use save-on-ground (I often get CTD after touchdown at EDDM for example). My settings:

Interval=60

Files=0

SaveOnGround=Yes

AlsoSave=CrashSaver

AlsoInterval=60

Looks like a new PC is on the cards (for many other reasons besides this). Thanks Pete for your help anyway.

[Autosave causing micro-pauses in FS9?]

Oh well, write-caching *is* already enabled on both HDD's (FS9 B-drive & Win7 C-drive). And it doesn't seem to make any difference to the pauses whether I turn write-caching on or off. Windows performance assessment gives the disk transfer rating 5.9 / 7 - if that means anything at all?

[Autosave causing micro-pauses in FS9?]

Wow! 1-3 seconds!? you must have a seriously badly performing disk system! Normal small file writes are cached and hardly ever affect foreground activity. Maybe you need to free up more space on disk? Maybe you need to check disk write settings -- turning off disk caching in order to avoid data loss on a system crash would make it force-write files immediately, which wouldn't be good with a slow or congested disk system.

Well, I've suspected this for a long time - data writes seem appallingly slow compared to my WinXP experience on the same hardware. It was was *much* worse with Vista, but still not good now I have Win7. But I have 34GB free (of 50GB total) on the FS9 partition, and 165GB free (of 465GB total) on the Windows partition. So probably not a consequence of restricted disk space?

If I were you I'd look at defragmenting your disk, the one holding your flight files, and freeing up space. And check that you have write caching allowed. Not sure where that's specified offhand.

Have defrag'ed the disk a few times already. Not sure about disk cacheing settings though - will check that at a saner time of day and report back. Thanks for quick response :)

[Autosave causing micro-pauses in FS9?]

AutoSave 1.501 & FS2004

Hope this is the right forum. For a while now I have noticed minor pauses every 30 seconds or so (FS2004 on Win7 32-bit). I opened the resource monitor and found the pauses were caused by disk write activity, and finally traced it to the autosave function. Every time it writes a new file it causes a brief pause (probably 1-3 seconds at most). This is merely irritating in the cruise phase, but much worse at critical phases during manual handling, as it tends to result in over-control as the flight control inputs don't take effect during the pause. Autosave is a brilliant addition that I don't want to ditch (saves my bacon on VATSIM flights after the inevitable CTD). Is this a known problem with autosave. Is there a work around?