Project Reality Forums

I have this issue with PR where there is an unhealthy amount of split second (sometimes even more than 1 second) freeze/stuttering occurring, usually occasionally. Every time these stutters happen, HDD usage is at 100%, and a quick stutter is easily invoked by moving across the map quickly in aircraft, though it also happens just being on the ground. Problem with this is that at low altitude and during certain aerial maneuvers that will easily cause you to lose control.

In addition, after exiting the game, my HDD usage goes up to 100% again. According to the resource monitor, the post-exit usage is coming from "System" and/or "scvhost.exe (LocalSystemNetworkRestricted)." RAM usage during game play is typically 3-3.5 GB out of 4GB.

I googled this up before posting and found that the scvhost.exe is apparently sound drivers, as well as the suggestions of disabling QOS on the network adapter and defragmenting the hard drive. My hard drive is regularly defragmented by Windows each week and I also tried manually defragging the Battlefield 2 Program Files folder with Defraggler. I tried disabling QOS and updating the Realtek sound drivers, but that didn't do anything. My FPS is usually anywhere from 30-100 FPS, so the lag never has any connection to current FPS. My ping is always within normal parameters. My graphics settings are medium/high with of course no AA with this card. This is the only game where I have these HDD usage issues.

System Specifications:
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-M68MT-S2P (rev. 3.0)
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
AMD Phenom II X4 965 C3 @ 3.4Ghz
NVIDIA Geforce 8600GTS
4GB DDR3 RAM
Western Digital 500GB SATA II HDD

Any suggestions would be great, thanks!

How big of a Page File are you using?
Is your Page File highly fragmented?
If your Page file is fragmented, use this tutorial to defrag it:
How to defrag MFT, Page File, Registry, System Files in Windows 7

I'd suggest doing this tutorial:
https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f27-pr ... b-ram.html


With 4GB of RAM you want to use this tutorial to allow PR.exe to use more than 2GB of RAM,
https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f27-pr ... b-ram.html

Make sure you do the correct steps for your specific OS.

If you are feeling adventurous, you could back up your audio drivers, using something like DriverBackup:
DriverBackup! - Download
Then go to Device Manager and Uninstall ALL of your Audio drivers.
Reboot your PC, and let the New Hardware Wizard reinstall the drivers.
If anything goes wrong, start DriverBackup and restore the drivers.
The Audio Drivers might be defragmented, , deleting them, rebooting them, then reinstallingh them, then possibly defragmenting the HDD again, could help.
[/QUOTE]

I hope these steps help you out, I am not sure what the problem is without sitting in front of the PC because it is probably a driver or system file issue.

Hi there, I have 4-12GB page file allocated. Please advise if those are not recommended settings.



I didn't use the defragmenter in the link you posted because of allegations by Google Chrome that it is malware/phishing program; another article mentioning it had some people commenting that it did something weird like disable your keyboard.

I used UltraDefrag and ran a BootTime scan, which I believe defragmented the page file on account of the porgram features info saying:

UltraDefrag has the following features:
system files defragmentation (registry, page-file, ...)

and that it says the following in the BoomTime scan script:

UD_IN_FILTER=*windows*;*winnt*;*ntuser*;*pagefile.sys;*hiberfil.sys

It indeed defragmented some stuff before booting Windows so I think it did it.

In regards to the 4GB userkernel/userspace thread, it said that 64 bit operating systems don't need to do that so I figured I wouldn't mess with it.

I played again with all that done, but it still does that occasional stuttering and that strange "svchost.exe (LocalSystemNetworkRestricted)" taking up all the hard drive usage upon exiting.

I've heard that other people get those stutters, but I don't know if that's just normal or if it's a common problem, and I haven't heard of svchost.exe taking up 100% hard disk usage for 2 minutes after exiting the game.

I may try the audio driver uninstall some other time.

Thanks.

It is actually quite easy to figure out these kinds of issues if you know what to look for. The private working set is your memory, while the other number corresponds to CPU usage. Some programs in general take up a lot of CPU and/or memory. Mostly the hoggers are either AV programs or other security programs. Now it is very different when you have malware running, but as long as you know the list of processes that normally run on your system, you can learn to recognize the illegitimate ones.

3 things to do here:

1. Download and run this, no install, it runs where ever you download it:
Svchost Viewer - Windows 7 Forums
That should decipher what inside the service host is causing the problem.

2. Superfetch sometimes preloads the DLLs for drivers and then when another program that uses a DLL is shutdown, Superfetch does not properly release the svchost and dll related to it.
Try this:
jump into services.msc >> Superfetch >> stop then disable it may help u get away with it.

3. Use Process Explorer and hover the process name (with the same PID) for more information.

Hey, I don't understand what you meant with:

The private working set is your memory, while the other number corresponds to CPU usage.

,but that was some great information. I didn't even know about SuperFetcher. Indeed, in its properties menu in services.msc it lists the path to executable as "C:\Windows\system32\svchost.exe -k LocalSystemNetworkRestricted," the same process that was taking up all the HDD usage after exiting.

So I disabled it and there is no longer massive hard disk usage after exiting. Unfortunately there's still the same stuttering, but after talking with some people saying that they get the same stuttering, I guess it's just a problem with PR (correct me if I'm wrong). I'd like to think a SSD drive or more RAM might prevent that from happening.

Anyway, that's at least one problem solved. I'd just like to know exactly why the stuttering occurs. Is it because it has to load textures or something from the hard drive to the RAM?

Thanks for the help.

OK Googy, this isn't the easiest part of Windows to grasp, so I went and found a decent tl;dr answer for you:

Simply said, the working set is the collection of memory pages currently owned by your process and not swapped out (i.e. in RAM). That is somewhat inaccurate, however. Reality is a lot more complicated.

Windows maintains a minimum working set size and a maximum working set size for every process. The minimum working set is easy, it is what Windows will grant to every process (as long as it can, by physical limits).

The maximum working set is more dubious. If your program uses more memory than will fit in its quota, Windows will drop some pages. However, while they are no longer in your working set, these pages are not necessarily "gone".

Rather, those pages are removed from your working set and moved to the pool of available pages. As a consequence, if some other program needs more memory and no cleared pages are left over, your pages will be cleared, and assigned to a different process. When you access them, they will need to be fetched from the swapfile again, possibly purging other pages, if you are still above the maximum working set size.

However, if nobody asked for more memory in the mean time (or if all demands could be satisfied by pages that were unused anyway), then accessing one of those pages will simply make it "magically reappear" and kick out another page in its stead.

Thus, your process can have more pages in RAM than are actually in its working set, but it does not "officially" own them.

As to the stuttering, much of it is diagnosed on these forums by hunches and the knowledge of a long history of helping solve similar issues that arise. With the NVIDIA Geforce 8600GTS it's probable you will have stuttering in urban settings, and in areas with many enterable buildings, also when moving very fast in a vehicle. Tell us where you are experiencing the stutter and how long the stutter lasts, and if it is repeated stuttering rapidly or just once in a while. We'll get some people in here to give you some pointers in further minimizing it if possible. But there IS stutter related to lag and server hiccups.