SMP plugin hangs

[flydav]

During my last flight all of a sudden and without any apparent reason my fps dropped to 1-3  so after waiting a few minutes and seeing that the situation wasn't improving by itself I tried to disable silverlining and to my surprise everything went back to normal fps (40-45). Then I enabled silverlining and and everything was ok again so I guess that something wasn't working with the plugin the moment that the fps was low. Let me know if you need any log file next time that happens again.

Edited October 29, 2015 by flydav

[sundog]

My guess would be that you were starting to swap memory, and disabling SMP for a moment just gave your system enough headroom to recover.

[flydav]

My guess would be that you were starting to swap memory, and disabling SMP for a moment just gave your system enough headroom to recover.

I guess your guess is right! it was actually swapping I had zero or close to zero VRAM and the RAM was going down crazy. I was flying over a dense OSM and photoreal area so I know that could have been the reason. What I was not guessing is that switching to my current 5k retina iMac i7 with 32GB ram and 4GB VRAM could give me such problem! There is really no super duper powerful computer out there and I'm not even using "extreme" texture rendering just "very high"

[MercuryMat]

I also had this problem, and my system stopped working in seconds. To me, after some tests seems SMP 3 uses quite much vram even at low settings. Fps are generally better, but soon happens to fill the vram with some complex sceneries and/or weather conditions. Standard clouds seems have less impact on vram but they have more impact on fps. Someimes I also experienced some stuttering I never had before installing SMP. May be there is some memory bug somewhere?

...sent from One+ One using Tapatalk

[sundog]

If you need to conserve VRAM, start by hitting the "reset" button in SMP's configuration. Its default settings are designed to optimize both memory use and performance. Increasing the cloud draw distance or detail can greatly affect the amount of VRAM consumed. Also, broken stratiform consumes a bit more than solid. We included a real-time VRAM monitor so you can measure the impact different settings have as you apply them, and find the right balance for your system.

 

In default settings, SMP3 actually uses less VRAM than SMP2 did. I've looked very hard for any memory-related "bugs" or leaks in SMP3, and have not found evidence of any.