MP intermittent frame rate drops

I feel I've reached a level of confidence with DCS where I want to dip my toes into PvP, but so far the experience is bordering on unplayable. At various times I've tried connecting to 104th and BuddySpike but the result is often a game crash before I even get to select a plane. Once I waited 5+ minutes and made sure not to do anything while waiting, and managed to get into BuddySpike.

Now, I wouldn't mind the load times that much, but once in game I get regular drops to 1 to 2 FPS for 30s to a minute at a time. Completely random, completely smooth in between. This happens also when I play with friends on a small private server and they say it's when someone connects. Now, with half a dozen of us, once we're all in it's smooth, but on a public server there are people randomly joining all the time.

Can anyone confirm the reason for these intermittent frame rate drops and if there's anything I can do about them from my end?

You need to list your hardware specs so we can see what could be the weak link.

Intel i7-4790 3.6 GHz

nVidia GTX 970

12 GB RAM

Usually the bottleneck for games is either processor or graphics card, but as I said I have no problem with frame rates normally in SP or in MP between these blips.

You missed out what kind of storage devices you use, an SSD will have an enormous advantage over a slower HDD in DCS.

Yup, just worked out via another thread that this is an issue. I have an SSD but it's small and only runs my OS, not enough spare space for DCS. My main storage for personal files and games is HDD.

It's still weird though, that I have no issues in SP, even quite big missions, but something about MP kills it. I can understand the game is demanding, but then it should run badly all the time. If there's a specific MP process that triggers this kind of overload, to me that says that process is badly implemented or at least poorly optimised.

Probably because MP mission like Blue Flag consists alot of units particularly when the server full of players compared to SP. Its rarely below 12GB of RAM used. Just see yourself with MSI afterburner

So then it seems I can't play these popular servers with large MP missions without a pretty major system upgrade :(

Is this likely to be better on smaller public servers? As I said I get it when playing with friends on their server but it goes away after everyone joined and mission is set up. Guess it only happens when someone connects and/Or a new unit spawns, am I right?

VC give this a shot if you haven't already, your SSD pagefile should make up for the lack of system RAM (I have 16gb system RAM and can fly in any server uninterrupted for hours on end with no problems.)

https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=3645291&postcount=4

VC give this a shot if you haven't already, your SSD pagefile should make up for the lack of system RAM (I have 16gb system RAM and can fly in any server uninterrupted for hours on end with no problems.)

 

https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=3645291&postcount=4

I assume I need to first move DCS onto the SSD for this to work?

Edit: sorry, was being thick. Did some reading about page files and how to set them up, will give this a go. Thanks for the tip!

Sorry for double post, but just wanted to say thanks Mustang for the advice! It worked, with 32GB on the pagefile I managed to fly a decent length sortie on BuddySpike. I got taken out quite easily, but one step at a time. Still a little bit of stutter here and there, especially when opening the map, but never more than a minor nuisance.

Nice one, good job getting there in the end :)

Just want to bring this up again as I had time to fly a long-ish sortie on BuddySpike. Initial load got worse, but a it of waiting and it worked second time. The real issue was that after about 25 minutes of flying, I started getting those ridiculous 1 FPS lag spikes again. Usually not too long, although one happened on finals and caused me to crash. Is this the pagefile "filling up" as I spend more and more time in the server and more players/units spawn and move around?