Sporadic Freezing/Stuttering

[bolbies 13]

Hi, for some reason ArmA 3 will drop down to 0 FPS about every 5-10 seconds. This has been going on for about a week in both singleplayer and multiplayer, and even the main menu. All of my drivers are up to date, none of my other games are doing it, I have already validated and reinstalled, and there's nothing in the rpt. Is anybody else having this issue?

[forteh 11]

Are you running arma3 + mods from an ssd or mechanical hard disk? If it's a mechanical disk have you defragged it recently?

Try using resource monitor to see what the hard disk is doing when the slowdowns occur, it's possible that the game is simply waiting for data to be streamed of the disk.

[dredd713 10]

sorry for using this thread. but i need to make a new thread and it will not let me. i have a problem with arma 3 which i cannot find anywhere on the internet and i cannot play arma till this is resolved. can anyone help me? or atleast pm me on how to make a thread. and sorry again for using your thread.

[bolbies 13]

It's a hard disk but I haven't defragged it in about a month or so so I'll try that. I stared at the task manager for a while but it isn't struggling with anything and doesn't say it's not responding. It also seems like it also does it only when I'm moving. If I stand still I'm fine, but once I turn or walk, it starts stuttering.

[forteh 11]

I don't think task manager will show the problem sufficiently, run resmon.exe and watch the disk tab if the disk queue lengths spike in relation to the sturrering then that could point towards the hard disk. It might be worth installing defraggler, that will allow you to only defrag the arma3 folder (right click and defrag folder from submenu) so you don't need to wait for the whole disk to run through.

[ratszo 17]

May want to look at dust-bunnies too --inspect the cpu heatsink lately?

[bolbies 13]

I don't think task manager will show the problem sufficiently, run resmon.exe and watch the disk tab if the disk queue lengths spike in relation to the sturrering then that could point towards the hard disk. It might be worth installing defraggler, that will allow you to only defrag the arma3 folder (right click and defrag folder from submenu) so you don't need to wait for the whole disk to run through.

There are definitely spikes in the hard faults/sec section. They go all the way to the top. What is that?

[forteh 11]

Hard faults are Microsoft's description of the page file being used. Basically your machine is running out of ram and starting to write data to the page file on the hard disk.

How much ram do you have? Use the maxmem start-up command to limit the amount of ram used by arma to 1gig below what you have installed and it should stop paging so much.

[bolbies 13]

Hard faults are Microsoft's description of the page file being used. Basically your machine is running out of ram and starting to write data to the page file on the hard disk.

How much ram do you have? Use the maxmem start-up command to limit the amount of ram used by arma to 1gig below what you have installed and it should stop paging so much.

16gb of ram. I also ran the windows memory diagnostic tool and it didn't find any problems.

[forteh 11]

With that much ram you can pretty much disable the page file, it shouldn't be using the page file anyway. Was it arma3.exe that was causing the hard faults or another process?

[bolbies 13]

With that much ram you can pretty much disable the page file, it shouldn't be using the page file anyway. Was it arma3.exe that was causing the hard faults or another process?

It's only arma 3. Nothing else is open, no background processes like AVG pushing the computer, nothing. Plus it's ONLY arma 3. Every other game like DayZ and Dying Light run fine.

[forteh 11]

Try reducing your page file to minimum and see if that helps, also try artificially limiting maxmem to 3-4gb. Which memory allocator are you using?

How much ram does your machine normally use when playing? I have 8gb and set maxmem to 8192mb with the tbbmalloc allocator, I regularly see ram usage top 5.5gb in-game (recorded with afterburner osd) but no slowdowns. I have an 800mb page file on the my ssd but it doesn't get used.

[bolbies 13]

I use tbbmalloc and use about 5gb in-game as well. I think may be fine now but I'll have to test some more later.

[forteh 11]

Was this sp or mp that it seems ok with now? Could be linked to server hardware slow down if sp is now ok, another thought windows wasn't updating was it?

[bolbies 13]

It was multiplayer on a listen server. Haven't tried singleplayer and no windows wasn't updating.

[bolbies 13]

Alright well I played for a few hours and it seems to be fixed. Thank you so much forteh!

[forteh 11]

Perhaps it was just a random wobbly that caused Windows to page arma3 lots, glad it's sorted though :)

[jassida 10]

Don't disable your pagefile, just make it 1gb.