Huge Lag on Autosave

[Banalisator]

Good Evening, 

I've bought the FSUIPC just for the autosave, an extreme nice feature on my opinion.

Few days ago, I had to reinstall my FSUIPC (current version, its registered) and enabled the autosave function. All three ticks are enabled, save every 60 seconds. The saving works, but with every save, my Sim freezes for about 3 to 5 seconds, which is extremly annoying. I'm unable to do anything in the cockpit while the freeze. Tested with Aerosofts airbus A320 and the PMDG NGX. OS is Windows 10, sim is Prepar3D v3.3.

Any idea why? 

FSUIPC4.log is attached.

 

Thank you very much!

FSUIPC4.log

[Pete Dowson]

2 hours ago, Banalisator said:

The saving works, but with every save, my Sim freezes for about 3 to 5 seconds, which is extremly annoying. I'm unable to do anything in the cockpit while the freeze. Tested with Aerosofts airbus A320 and the PMDG NGX

Yes, this is a well known problem with sophisticated add-on aircraft.

All FSUIPC does for "autosave" is call the facility in FS, the same as if you pressed ";" and entered a filename for a saved flight, or did the same in the FS menus. The save itself is done by FS, not FSUIPC, so all FSUIPC's part is done simply by generating a name and calling an FS function. (To me it would seem more friendly to do it in dribs and drabs over a period, to avoid affecting performance -- but then, really, they are assuming that saves are only done through overt user action).

The problem with some of the more complex add-on aircraft is that they also save their settings at the same time -- automatically detecting when a flight is saved. When they do this they seem to freeze the aircraft whilst they collect and write out all the data, presumably freezing matters so that all the data relates to the one instant..

Sorry, but there's really nothing FSUIPC (or FS) can do about this. If the delay is inordinately long it may also be exacerbated by delays on the disk, though most folks leave Windows to default to buffering files in memory rather than have them written directly.

Pete

 

[Banalisator]

Ok, thanks Pete.

What seems confusing to me that before the reinstallation of the FSUIPC I haven't any of these problems. With 737, 777 and more, no problems.

 

36 minutes ago, Pete Dowson said:

though most folks leave Windows to default to buffering files in memory rather than have them written directly.

Can you explain that little bit more? I don't know what you exactly mean^^.

 

So FSUIPC can't do anything, but have you any other tips to prevent those freezes?

 

Thanks,

Ric

[Pete Dowson]

2 hours ago, Banalisator said:

What seems confusing to me that before the reinstallation of the FSUIPC I haven't any of these problems.

Well, since "installation of FSUIPC" is merely the placing of the module, FSUIPC4.DLL into the Modules folder and editing the DLL.XML file so that FS loads it, "reinstallation" changes nothing whatsoever.  How can it?

If things changed than, you must have done something else. Like maybe your computer memory is now  more heavily used so Windows cannot cache files for writing to disk as much as before. And/or maybe your hard disk is that much more inefficient through files and directories being fragmented.

Honestly, there is no way I can know, or put forward any other hypotheses. FSUIPC's part in saving flights is ONE CALL to SimConnect, a call which says "save a flight with this name". That's it! It couldn't be simpler! What else can I tell you?

2 hours ago, Banalisator said:

Can you explain that little bit more? I don't know what you exactly mean

There's a setting you can make to change the default behaviour on disk writes so that they get written immediately rather than cached. I don't remember where it is now or what it is called, and I'm pretty sure this is always defaulted off in Windows these days. It certainly will be if you've not changed it.

[LATER] Here's a reference if you want to read more: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa364218(v=vs.85).aspx

2 hours ago, Banalisator said:

So FSUIPC can't do anything, but have you any other tips to prevent those freezes?

Yes, two, but you won't like either:

Either don't use such complex add-on aircraft, or
Don't use any form of Autosave, whether FSUIPC's or any of the other utilities which offer this.

One way of having sophisticated realistic aircraft systems without all of the complexities being within the code bolted into FS is to use separate avionics suites, like Project Magenta, ProSim, or SimAvionics.  I use Prosim737 and the aircraft model used is based on the default FSX 738.(Mind you, these have their own difficulties providing proper recovery files like autosave).

The other alternative is, of course, ask yourself whether you really need Autosave. Why do you need it? Is your system crashing? If so, wouldn't it be better to find out why and fix that instead? I don't remember the last crash I had.

If the autosave is just so you can resume a flight part way through, then normal user-instigated saving would suffice.

Pete

 

 

 

[Banalisator]

First, big apologize that I haven't wrote any answer. However, I got no notification, sorry for that.

 

I will test your tip later today.

 

On ‎05‎.‎11‎.‎2016 at 0:40 AM, Pete Dowson said:

The other alternative is, of course, ask yourself whether you really need Autosave. Why do you need it?

I haven't a lot of crashes, but sometimes there is one. Could be the DINPUT.dll, when my yoke reconnects (I'm about to solve that), sometimes the ntdll.dll (no idea where the reason is).

 

Thanks anyway!