Game freezes up for a few seconds...then resumes normally [again]

NeKryXe · September 2020

As far as I understood this is an old problem but it only started at my system after reinstalling the game on the big update from February.

Once every minute or so, the game freezes for a couple of seconds and then resume normally.

I haven't made any changes to my PC for the last 2 years, no new hardware or software.

Obviously I tried with no addons, I've been updating all drivers in the last months and even repaired the game, but never found a way to fix it.

I've been searching everywhere, mostly I find old discussions but no one says how it was fixed.

Any ideas?

DarknessShallFall · September 2020

I've been having similar issues the past few weeks were the game will freeze, and start again, and latency is all over the dang place. I thought it might be my extender but others are having issues.

vivisectvib16_ESO · September 2020

Same..PS4 NA. I've tried all of their trouble shooting and nothing solves it. I've also submitted support tickets about it, with zero response. Clearly a server side issue that continues to be ignored.

ZOS_Bill · September 2020

@NeKryXe

The next step to try is another reinstall of ESO since removing add-ons and repairing have not helped so far.

Idinuse · October 2020

How many cores does your CPU have?
Are you using an Nvidia GPU? If so, I have had success with these settings:
Disable all audio drivers except the main driver you are using. In my case I disabled the Nvidia audio driver in my devices.
In UserSettings.txt change this setting to:

SET MinFrameTime.2 "0.00000000"

This setting should be used together with the Max Frame Rate setting in Nvidia Control Panel only. Since my monitor has a max frame rate of 60FPS at the resolution I'm playing, I have that setting at ON and 58. I also have the low latency mode to ON but I don't think that is relevant to the issue (micro stutter).

If you have more than 4 cores you can try to manually set the core usage in the UserSettings.txt. Try setting it to "4" or less cores i.e. "2" in the file:

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "4"
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "-1"
^(My CPU has 4 cores, 4 threads and no Hyper Threading)
Apart from that I use a program called "Intelligent Standby List Cleaner". https://www.wagnardsoft.com/content/intelligent-standby-list-cleaner-v1000-released

"The application will monitor and clear the memory standby list according to the configured options parameter you set.
It should help users who have stutters in games when using windows 10 Creator update and higher version of windows."

You can set the Timer Resolution when the prog is in "stopped" mode, I have it at 0.5ms and my conditions ar set for 8GB memory, so it purges "standby list memory" when "list size" is at least 1024MB and free memory below 1024MB.

All this has made my game as smooth as it possibly can get. I hope your problem gets solved.

Edit: Note that all changes to UserSettings.txt need to be done without the game running for the changes to stick.

etchedpixels · October 2020

NeKryXe wrote: »

As far as I understood this is an old problem but it only started at my system after reinstalling the game on the big update from February.

Once every minute or so, the game freezes for a couple of seconds and then resume normally.

I haven't made any changes to my PC for the last 2 years, no new hardware or software.

Obviously I tried with no addons, I've been updating all drivers in the last months and even repaired the game, but never found a way to fix it.

I've been searching everywhere, mostly I find old discussions but no one says how it was fixed.

Any ideas?

Lots will have changed on your PC in two years - all those automatic game, OS and other product updates!

Two thoughts:

- Do you only have 8GB RAM. If the game plus your other stuff ends up swapping to disk you'll see spikes like that (and the memory usage of the game seems to have changed) ?
- Are other graphic intensive games showing anything similar. If so you may want to check things like CPU fan and dust clogging because your machine will slow down hard if it gets close to overheating ('throttling') which can sometimes look like that ?

votan73 · October 2020

OP, do you show offline guild members and friends?
If yes, does it get better, if you hide them?

ApostateHobo · October 2020

I've been having a similar issue on ps4 as well. Doesn't happen every minute, but it is fairly frequent. Only started happening after the stonethorn update for me.

NeKryXe · October 2020

etchedpixels wrote: »

Lots will have changed on your PC in two years - all those automatic game, OS and other product updates!

Two thoughts:

- Do you only have 8GB RAM. If the game plus your other stuff ends up swapping to disk you'll see spikes like that (and the memory usage of the game seems to have changed) ?
- Are other graphic intensive games showing anything similar. If so you may want to check things like CPU fan and dust clogging because your machine will slow down hard if it gets close to overheating ('throttling') which can sometimes look like that ?

It was my bad after all. I was removing the addons but I left the libraries. Turns out that also removing all the libraries fixes the problem. I just noticed that a couple of days ago.

Well, it stills hangs slightly from time to time but nothing dramatic.

Anyway I use 2x M.2 NVMe SSD, both pretty fast and 32GB of ram. I also keep my computer clean and well ventilated and I've been paying only four games in the last years. There's no big changes.

I'll be playing with no libraries meanwhile and I'll try to find later which one was causing the freezes.

Thanks to all for the help and sorry for the mistake with the libraries.

NeKryXe · October 2020

votan73 wrote: »

OP, do you show offline guild members and friends?
If yes, does it get better, if you hide them?

never thought of that.

I'll try it if it freezes again. thanks

NeKryXe · October 2020

Idinuse wrote: »

How many cores does your CPU have?
Are you using an Nvidia GPU? If so, I have had success with these settings:
Disable all audio drivers except the main driver you are using. In my case I disabled the Nvidia audio driver in my devices.
In UserSettings.txt change this setting to:

SET MinFrameTime.2 "0.00000000"

This setting should be used together with the Max Frame Rate setting in Nvidia Control Panel only. Since my monitor has a max frame rate of 60FPS at the resolution I'm playing, I have that setting at ON and 58. I also have the low latency mode to ON but I don't think that is relevant to the issue (micro stutter).

If you have more than 4 cores you can try to manually set the core usage in the UserSettings.txt. Try setting it to "4" or less cores i.e. "2" in the file:

SET MaxCoresToUse.4 "4"
SET RequestedNumJobThreads "4"
SET RequestedNumWorkerThreads "-1"
^(My CPU has 4 cores, 4 threads and no Hyper Threading)
Apart from that I use a program called "Intelligent Standby List Cleaner". https://www.wagnardsoft.com/content/intelligent-standby-list-cleaner-v1000-released

"The application will monitor and clear the memory standby list according to the configured options parameter you set.
It should help users who have stutters in games when using windows 10 Creator update and higher version of windows."

You can set the Timer Resolution when the prog is in "stopped" mode, I have it at 0.5ms and my conditions ar set for 8GB memory, so it purges "standby list memory" when "list size" is at least 1024MB and free memory below 1024MB.

All this has made my game as smooth as it possibly can get. I hope your problem gets solved.

Edit: Note that all changes to UserSettings.txt need to be done without the game running for the changes to stick.

It's running better now that I removed the libraries, but I'm going to test your suggestion anyway.

Thanks a lot.