That alone is enough to verify this is in fact not the same issue I'm having. I have spent several weeks testing my issue, and abnormally high RBD with minimal-to-no disk activity is always hand-in-hand with my lag spikes.djnoob wrote:I need to do some more testing but I did see one instance where there was a jump in the RBD that correlated to a hitch but it was a LOT smaller than yours. It only jumped to 500+ kb (yes that's with a k). I'd seen a couple of times where it jumped to a few MB but didn't see a hitch.
This makes me think that Alan Phipps was right about a possible memory allocation issue. Might want to consider Memtest86+ or another memory analysis tool. Or it might be OS-related, so maybe keep an eye on Page Fault Delta when your FPS drops. Unsure.djnoob wrote:I also have seen a new issue. I did as I have done previously in my testing, started up a brand new game and then just ran seta. Well after about 30-45 min my game had stayed running around 60 fps with 10x seta running, then all of a sudden it dropped down to about 25fps and never went back up. Even when I turned seta off and my fps still did not go back up. I saved the game, then restarted x3 all together and went back to that save and still my fps was only around 25. There was no corresponding increase in the RBD, IO, or disk activity.
To be clear, when I say lag spikes (hitches, hangups, etc.) I mean complete freezes in the game. Everything takes a break; image, sound, everything - though sometimes the Computer Voice might repeat itself a couple times if it was trying to say something just as the lag was kicking in. Any open in-game windows close as if I ticked the X or pressed Esc, and parts of the interface (sidebar, dynamic readouts, etc.) momentarily disappear for each duration. All other programs are fine, but the game is no longer using up the graphics card, and RBD skyrockets. In between these freezes, the FPS momentarily returns into the upper teens and lower 20s during even the most hectic events I've ever encountered*.
*I have a Salvage Insurance save right now (whose playthrough is the sole purpose of hunting the cause of this issue) where I am just about to aid some friendly Teladi to engage an entire Pirate squadron consisting of roughly 10 or so M2, M3, and M4 class fighters (along with a pirate cruiser dispatching some 3 or so Blastclaws and a Blastclaw Prototype just before it enters firing range) which puts my initial FPS somewhere around 40, dropping to the lower 20s when everyone opens fire. Just under 10 seconds after they open fire, the entire game begins grinding to a halt, the RBD goes to 40MB/s, and the symptoms I mention above all come into play - rendering any combat without cheats suicide by default. That's why I am using the Cheat Package, otherwise I would likely have never been able to so confidently confirm the correlation between the lag spikes and high RBD count.
With all that said and done I am going to go ahead and post my own thread now. Thanks for helping verify with ProcEx. Hopefully it might prove useful to you in the future. It's quite the handy tool.