Question re scenery scans

[andy1252]

Hi,

I recently saw the following quoted in another forum -

"Despite the convenience, one reason not to have all your scenery active is to avoid one possible cause of stutters/pauses/long-frames.

There are many explanations for these performance glitches. One is that P3D will periodically scan bgl's and texture files located in sceneries far distant to your flight path... often on completely different continents. This unnecessary disk access can't be good for performance and is easily verified by running ProcessMonitor. Sceneries that are inactive in the scenery library are not subject to these rogue scans."

and I'm just curious if anyone from LM can confirm or deny this? The quote was in response to a post I had made regarding load times for a large scenery library. I'd essentially said that since 4.5 plus the hotfix it felt like I didn't need to keep most of my scenery de-activated all the time.

If it is true, I'll go back to my old ways as I certainly do get pauses and stutters even after a fairly major tuning and upgrade exercise.

[downscc]

My first response to that advice as an engineer is not positive. For one, your I/O channel in your computer has all the bandwidth it needs for P3D to operate normally. I guess if we were talking about today's data demands two decades ago this kind of thinking might be appropriate but not with today's systems.

I have literally hundreds of scenery addons of all kinds and have never seen an advantage to turning off anything with just a few exceptions. If you have photo scenery and are not using it then initial loading times will be faster if that is disabled but performance once loaded is unchanged. Certain city scape products have huge libraries of scenery objects and P3D does have a problem with loading scenery objects and has been observed to significantly increase I/O activity during library scans but it's not the I/O activity that causes long frames.

No, I do not represent LM but I've been around computers since I built my first one in the early 80's and I have a BSEE with an IT-MBA. Not a programmer but trained well enough to smell BS when I see it.