noted OOM Errors in Toronto Area (CYYZ)

[JohnE77]

So, on final approach last night into CYYZ with Fly Tampa's scenery I got an OOM crash before touchdown, so my flight was lost. Today I uninstalled the Fly Tampa scenery, so I was just using the default CYYZ with P3D v3.2. On a flight from KATL to CYYZ today with default scenery at both airports (although with Global and Open LC Canada) I touched down at CYYZ and 15 seconds later I got another OOM crash. Fortunately I was able to file my PIREP this time!

 

I've read on the Internet that the Toronto area is really taxing on VAS, especially with FTX Vector. Could any changes be made to FTX Vector to improve this problem? Any other tips?

 

Much appreciated,

John

[Lude2Envy]

Unfortunately, this has been an ongoing problem for some time. I think I remember Martin from FlyTampa saying there is something inherently wrong with the CYYZ area and he was unable to isolate it. I can't remember if it was something with the sim causing a memory leak or something else. Vector notoriously eats up a ton of VAS so you have to be careful. Sadly, I don't even use Vector anymore. I only use Global, LC NA/Europe, and FTX Trees. I love vector but it just isn't friendly with complex aircraft and scenery - especially FT's CYYZ and Aerosoft's EGLL Xtended. 

[Stewart Hobson]

I don't fly jetliners.  But I have found that flying in busy areas such as LAX and SEA, you can get some help with vas overload by turning down autogen density to normal and cloud draw distance all the way to the left.  It seems to work for me, even though I might fly a high def aircraft like Carenado's TBM850.

[Lude2Envy]

On 7/18/2016 at 3:26 PM, Stewart Hobson said:

I don't fly jetliners.  But I have found that flying in busy areas such as LAX and SEA, you can get some help with vas overload by turning down autogen density to normal and cloud draw distance all the way to the left.  It seems to work for me, even though I might fly a high def aircraft like Carenado's TBM850.

 

I keep my autogen at normal, but I keep my cloud draw at 90 since it's more realistic - especially for jets at higher altitudes. While Carenado uses high res textures, their flight dynamics and avionics are mostly built off the default FSX/P3D files so they don't use up a lot of VAS like your more complex addons like PMDG, FSL, Majestic, and A2A. 

[maxhades]

Have the same problem with Toronto, Seattle and Los Angeles! Not possible to fly with PMDG without OOM! And it doesn't help a lot to set autogen below normal level!

[Richard Lincoln]

Hello John,

 

 

On 18/07/2016 at 7:05 AM, JohnE77 said:

Could any changes be made to FTX Vector to improve this problem? Any other tips?

 

I have noticed as others have that certain areas especially in high density (ie) city areas like Seattle,Toronto are famous for an OOM. Apart from lowering your settings I do not see a way around it, I am sending this to be looked at by the developer. 

[fuzz1]

Hello Richard,

 

I would gladly accept that in very busy areas and with all Vector options ticked OOMs will be a fact of life.  What I find difficult to accept is that these OOM's are occurring in areas far less complex, as described in my post here:

 

I continue to experience 'unexplained' VAS use by Vector in relatively rural areas.   Today I spawned the default Cessna at CYVV Wiarton, Ontario and sitting on the runway 3.2Gb of Vas was being used.   I was able to complete one circuit of this airport, approx. 20 min's worth of flying and it OOM'd.   Can you please also ask the developers to look into this problem? If this happened at Seattle or San Francisco I would understand, but a small airport like Wiarton with its relatively sparse surroundings?  I see this particular phenomenon repeatedly and is particularly prevalent in Southern Ontario, Canada, my home turf.

 

Not to belittle other problems being reported but I see this as a very serious issue, as the problem is not confined to a given airport or small area that appears corrupt (that you can always just avoid), but one that is a total show - stopper.  You cannot use the sim at all in very large areas that are affected by this OOM anomaly, when Vector is active.  I have essentially given up on using Vector in southern Ontario in its present state.

 

I should add this problem only appears in NA for me.  Perhaps something is wrong with the way NA OLC is playing together with Vector?   In similarly uncomplicated areas in Europe I see a full 1Gb less VAS use with Vector active.

 

Thanks for your anticipated understanding and support.

[Richard Lincoln]

Hello Fuzz1,

 

                     I will do some testing, especially around CYVV, I have viewed the attached post and am working on it.

 

 

 

[fuzz1]

Extremely grateful for your effort Richard.    I can tell you these are my test parameters:

 

FSX A

All Vector options checked

All sliders to the right except Mesh - 5m and water 2x high.

Fair weather with sparse clouds.

Road Traffic 15%, Water - 10%

No airTraffic

Cloud draw distance 80 with Rex 512 clouds.

No weather programs running.

LOD radius 6.5

 

Hope this might help, thanks again for your effort Richard!

 

 

[davecessna]

I still reach near OOM's with LOD 4.5...

 

I'm pretty sure there is a legacy bug/memory leak from FSX that is in the CYYZ area scenery still present in P3D. I don't use nearly as much VAS spawning in KEWR or even KJFK and those areas are much more densely populated than Toronto, even with Vector maxed out.

 

If whoever is debugging wants some extra hands to run specific tests, I would be more than willing to help, even if only to find the root cause of these issues.

[CaptKornDog]

 Trying to trace this down myself, potentially may be Vector related and I've posted some graphs in the linked thread.

[fuzz1]

On ‎2016‎-‎08‎-‎22 at 8:52 PM, Richard Lincoln said:

Hello Fuzz1,

 

                     I will do some testing, especially around CYVV, I have viewed the attached post and am working on it.

 

 

 

 

Hi Richard,

 

As it's been a couple of weeks now can you please offer us any comments on the results of your testing?   At this point even an acknowledgement of this rather serious problem from your end would be appreciated.

 

Unlike other more cosmetic Vector issues, this one prevents one from using our simulator at all in certain areas with Vector active, and it affects very large areas in N. America.  I would really like to think that the developers at Pilots are taking this one seriously as vector is consuming huge amounts of VAS artificially, in areas not that complex.

[John Dow]

I just noticed in your list of settings you have water set to High.  I don't know if it will help you but I can fly all around these areas in many aircraft (I don't fly complex airliners though, but the DHC6 is probably representative) and I don't get OOMs.  Sometimes I get the FSUIPC chimes, and usually after a while I just save and reset, annoying but we are taxing a 32 bit program to its limits.

 

Anyway, I keep my water settings to Low 2X or lower.  Maybe that's the difference?

 

Here are my settings:

 

FSX Gold

All Vector options checked

All sliders to the right except Mesh - 5m and water 2x Low or lower.

Fair weather with sparse clouds.

Road Traffic 15%, Water - 10%

No airTraffic

Cloud draw distance 60 with default clouds.

No weather programs running.

LOD radius 4.5.

 

I have a 4K monitor running at 3840 x 2160, 4790K at 4.6GHz, high end motherboard with 16GB RAM, and an MSI GTX970 videocard.

 

Now, there is one surprising finding I am exploring at the moment... that the idea of clearing all non-essential programs is possibly incorrect.  Why?  Because I sometimes notice that starting FSX from a Windows reboot (ie supposed maximum resources available) gives me stutters and generally lower performance.

 

But... if I start FSX after running Photoshop, all web applications, some documents and even video editing, and leave those programs inactive but still resident on the taskbar, FSX seems to run smoother.  The only thing I can atribute this to is the possibilty that these programs have grabbed their share of the 16GB RAM away from the Windows 'vault' and since they're not actually using it, it's free for FSX to access.  ????  Try it!

[fuzz1]

I appreciate your suggestions John but they don't apply in my case.  You may not have read the post referenced in my post #7 above.  The problem is explained more fully in that thread with specific test results and has nothing to do with settings or background tasks.

 

The problem is that Vector is consuming over 1Gb of Vas in certain uncomplicated areas of N. America, (non-region areas).   All sliders and settings remained the same during the test comparison as between vector activated vs. vector inactivated.   There is something wrong with Vector in N. America as it is artificially consuming VAS where there appears no visual justification for it to do so.  Much less VAS is consumed by Vector in comparable areas in Europe, and even in other parts of N.America not afflicted with this problem wherein the number of Vector objects are triple the size in a given radius.  I invite you to duplicate the parameters of my tests and see if you get any different results, with the only change in parameters being vector on or off.  Use CYVV and CYGK as examples.

 

Thanks again for your willingness to help John;  I think however it is time for Pilots to provide some comments regarding this problem.  

[John Dow]

I just ran a test of the area in question and yes I concur that it is possible to run out of memory as you say.  I started a flight from CYVV to CYGK in the RealAir Duke Turbine and about 40 minutes into the flight the sim advised me I had run out of memory.

 

I then set the LOD radius to low and completed the flight.  If you look at the topography of the region you can see why there's such a huge hit on VAS from Vector, there is an enormous amount of detailed lakes and coastlines that Vector has to model.

 

As I approached CYGK about 30 miles out I increased the LOD radius to Medium and landed uneventfully.

 

Richard may have a different take on this but I suspect it is not a problem with Vector, rather it's a problem of too much detail being called up, that's where the 1GB of VAS is going.  To fly in this region with OLC NA and Vector you might have to set the LOD radius down to a level that the 32 bit program can handle.

 

Interestingly, just on a side note, with Vector enabled I saw trees and houses in the water next to CYVV.  Are you seeing that?

[fuzz1]

John thanks so much for taking the time to conduct this test and in fact, yours is thus far the most useful information I have yet encountered addressing this particular anomaly.

 

Lakes and coastlines!   Yes that could be it;  as I recall, the many other areas in N. America I ran across with similar VAS consumption also had many lakes and coastlines (but relatively few conventional objects). VAS is not a problem in the Canadian prairie provinces, for instance.

 

Up to this point I thought that the other Vector objects...roads, tunnels, related traffic, etc., were what consumed most of the VAS.   I had no idea that the lake and coastline

modelling was this VAS intensive.    In retrospect, many of the bad VAS areas are located near the Great Lakes and this may account for the large VAS numbers.  Although, I don't fully understand why this is apparent.   I would have thought this would be no different than, say, flying up and down the coasts of many European countries around the Mediterranean...I don't encounter similar vas issues in such locales.  Try it and see...flying down the Western coast of Greece or Italy yields nowhere near these numbers we are seeing in N. America.    

 

It could therefore very well be that something in the 'new' N. America isn't working quite right with Vector and this is probably worth Pilot's time in looking at.  These VAS problems I'm now experiencing only became apparent since I went through the migration process and purchased OLC NA.  Something in these changes could be affecting the way Vector is performing.  One weird thing I've noticed about conducting tests in these VAS-troubled N.American areas and this may or may not be relevant to the problem:   Upon spawning at my test locations, my FSUIPC counter initially reads something like 1.3gb VAS available and with 5-10 seconds or so, still sitting on the runway having touched nothing, it suddenly drops again by up to 500mg.   This VAS counter behaviour is consistent in all the troublesome locations;   in all other 'normal' locations the VAS counter remains steady and the counter behaves normally...the VAS number reducing steadily as the flight progresses with no huge sudden drops. 

 

In the interim I'll be conducting some further tests in Vector, disabling lakes and coastlines, etc, to see how it affects VAS.

 

I am also seeing the tree/houses in the water issues next to CYVV that you have observed. 

 

Ultimately if one has to deactivate lakes and coastlines to fly anywhere in lake populated N. American areas with Vector active, so be it;  it's just a shame this would represent the only viable solution. 

 

 

[fuzz1]

I've performed further VAS tests and I now understand there is no option to turn off 'lakes and coastlines' in Vector.   So I turned off every water-related option I could find...small rivers and streams, wetlands and beaches.

 

I repeated the parameters of my VAS test at CYVV and turning off these vector options only produced a 50mb savings in VAS so this wasn't the answer.   I'm still spawning at CYVV in the default Cessna with only 800mb available vas vs. 750mb available with the above options turned off.

 

Deactivating the Vector CVX entry in the scenery library gave me back a whopping 850mb in VAS.  

 

So the situation remains...if you want to fly in N. American areas containing an appreciable amount of lakes and coastlines with Vector on....you really can't.  The solution appears to be turning off Vector completely.    I can't conceive that this is the result Vector developers intended.

 

[fuzz1]

I think I've found somewhat of a solution.  I repeated the CYVV test with my LOD reduced to 4.5 vs. the 6.5 I've always been using and the results astounded me.   I gained back

750mb of Vector VAS from this change alone.    

 

Just to be clear, I've always used 6.5 with Orbx (and Vector) which has previously been tolerated well by my system, providing a good balance of visuals vs. performance.  It seems that all the recent changes (migration, NA OLC, Vector updates) has somehow caused Vector to become hyper-sensitive to LOD changes when flying in areas with many lakes and coastlines (but only in N. America).   While this is not the solution I hoped for, as a 6.5 LOD was never a problem for me before, at least this represents the lesser of the evils...reducing to 4.5 vs. turning off Vector completely.  That way I can at least complete a few flights in my home areas.  

 

I hope this thread is not marked as 'resolved' under the circumstances because it isn't.  This is just a workaround...reducing detail to get Vector to eat less VAS in N. America in comparison to Europe wherein Vector VAS at a 6.5 LOD setting is a non-issue. 

 

In any event I hope this info may assist others experiencing similar Vector VAS issues.

[CaptKornDog]

Just posted my additional findings in this thread:

 

 

(4.5 LOD on my system by default, and no LC installed, just Vector/Global in the area.) Definitely a large difference in VAS usage on my system with Vector enabled vs disabled while flying over Canada.  This effect is reduced if you start disabling Vector features.

 

Happy to continue flying in the region with and without Vector to record VAS drops.  I hope this can be further investigated by developers.  This sure hinders long haul flights.

[CaptKornDog]

Any chance there's been any findings from the Developers on this?

[Richard Lincoln]

Hello CaptKornDog,

 

                               This has already been sent, I will ping him again with it Tonight guys. Unfortunately it is the best I can do from this side, I am unaware of where Bernd is up too in his Development but will ask.

[CaptKornDog]

Thank you.  I look forward to further updates and a fix.

[Darcy13]

Any more work done on this.  I can't fly to or out of Toronto because of High VAS usage.  Too bad as I fly for Virtual Air Canada.  I am fine in Vancouver, Montreal Edmonton Calgary.  Weird.

 

Thanks

Darcy

 

FSS0505630

[CaptKornDog]

I, too, was just wondering the same thing.  Flying EGLL-KSFO currently, just entered NE Canada and lost 200 MB of VAS, even with watered-down Vector settings.

[B77X]

I was in northern Quebec near CYGW when my FSX out of memory errored. In the middle of nowhere and my VAS ran out. OOM can happen but on approach with heavy scenery in big cities. Not in the far north. If Vector is the issue would this be patched soon-ish? Just in case I lowered my autogen slider and that has helped I am flying farther north this morning will hope to avoid another OOM.

[Richard Lincoln]

Hello,

 

         I have sent this thread to PILOTS twice, well this one and the original report. I do understand your frustration although I do not know where PILOTS are up to in development and or a fix. I will send it again as part of the cumulative list so far. Thank You for the input guys.

 

On that note I am Locking the topic, I think the point has been made and substantiated. Hopefully a fix will be done shortly.