3-5 second lag when switching active window

I'm experiencing something odd with ISBoxer - it seems like after playing for an hour or so I start to experience a 3-5 second freeze when switching which window is active. What's strange is that it'll be active for about 1 second, then freeze for 3-5 seconds, and then become active again.

I was experiencing this on my old system - 2 cores, 4gb ram, 260gtx, but I'm also experiencing this on my new system - 8 cores, 8gb ram, 5850, so I'm thinking it isn't a resource issue. Is it possible it's a memory leak in WoW? Or...?

Any ideas on what's causing it and, more importantly, what I can do to fix it?

Thanks!

Not really sure on that.
I'd ask Lax in the IRC, probably.

Switches should be virtually instant.
IS Boxer renders everything at the full size all the time.
So there's nothing extra to strain your system during the switch.

are the effects (shadows, distance etc.) different on the main and small screens?

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Originally Posted by Sam DeathWalker

are the effects (shadows, distance etc.) different on the main and small screens?

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All effects are the same, but the native resolution is different - I'll change that and see if it works.

The resolution is the same because ISBoxer enforces that to make it instant (unless you're adjusting the resolution once you get in game or something?), unless Swap is disabled and then you don't get swapping fast or slow. The resolution listed in the game shouldn't matter THAT much (pretty much just sets the aspect ratio). I need to make ISBoxer adjust it in config.wtf in addition to what it already does...

I got your email on this topic and haven't responded yet because I can't think of a reason this would happen. You don't accidentally launch Keyclone after an hour and attach it with Maximizer set up do you? ;) It COULD be a power management option. If you go into the Windows power management options and find the ADVANCED power management settings, you should see "Processor power management" with a minimum and maximum. If the "plugged in" setting is not set to 100% for minimum and maximum the CPU may have its power reduced, which might result in something like what you described (and can also make the game go slow then fast then slow then fast then slow then fast then slow then fast etc due to framerate limiting)

Well, i set the resolutions to be universally the same even if it shouldn't matter - and it *might* have worked, in that playing for an hour I didn't have the problem with the switching this time but it wasn't as long a session as other times. Here's hoping that was it!

I'll look at the power management settings too and make sure. Thanks :)

id go with you have a pagefile out of wack or something hitting the hd instead of your ram bank tbh. if you weren't using ISBoxer, it would matter how the resolution was done ingame hense the reason us non ISBoxers have specially linked seperate wow folders etc. gl on this issue :)

Well, I *think* I have sorted the problem, and will post it here to let anyone else having this trouble know:

On all of my character sets that I have the background windows throttled down to 10fps, when I switch screens I get that lag after 20-30 minutes of play. On the character sets that I have the background windows throttled down to 30fps, I have yet to get any lag when switching, even after a few hours.

Completely counter-intuitive, but that's the only difference I can think of between the two set-ups. Guess I'll boost all the other sets to 30fps when in background and see if that really fixes it. Here I thought that setting the background FPS to 10 would actually make things more responsive.

odd, I would think that your just running out of ram or something, have you checked to see how much ram you are using after 30 mins vs. how much available? I know your rig is good but never hurts to check, you might have other processes running you didn't realize or something.

It doesn't seem like there's that big a memory usage difference between the two setups, or from 30 minutes to 3 hours of play.

I've tried to recreate the problem on the set with 30fps background, and even going back and forth constantly for about 30-40 minutes switching windows etc. didn't cause it to have a problem. I did the ultimate test - everyone going to Dalaran at prime time and my performance was actually *better* with the 30fps background setup than the 10fps background.

The only thing I can think of is that the situation with 30fps is somehow causing my computer to stay in a high-power use mode/high-performance mode, while the 10fps one is needing a few seconds to ramp up to being active? That just sounds strange to me, but I guess I could see it.

The only other test I want to run tonight is where I turn on mouse broadcasting because that seems to REALLY eat up the resources, and see if that avoids the switch to active lag from a 10fps background window. If it solves the problem, then I guess it could be that I simply wasn't using *enough* resources, counter-intuitive as that might seem.

In any case, it works really well now :)

Go into the Windows Power options, in the advanced section, and see if under "Processor power management" the minimum is not 100%. If not, that could be related

how high is your dpi set on your mouse is my first question regarding that :P