I have the same. It's really shitty when trying to get a good lap and ppl keep pitting in/out, it's like mission impossible then to do a good lap.

Specs :

AMD Athlon XP, 1533 MHz 2000+
XP Home Edition
ATI Radeon 9550
Maxtor 6E040L0
512MB RAM

BTW, my drive is a Seagate not a Maxtor (the main drive, I also have a Fujitsu and a Maxtor installed though). My bad.

That's really not likely the cause either IMO. It's in LFS itself, hardware isn't going to cause an issue like this. Or else every other sim has found a way around it for some reason

I have very little stuttering in the quali, in the race i had none whatsoever...

Got a P4 2400 mhz 1 gb memory and a 60gb pata disk not sata, so this should be very slow pc...

But i can run LFS in the race mode without stuttering, in the qualification with loads of guys pitting etc i got some stuttering.

What i see is that its mostly from my hard drive, everytime someone joins or pits in, the hdisk led lights up quite bad...

I think its purely in LFS this...

Quote from Koopa :

Got a P4 2400 mhz 1 gb memory and a 60gb pata disk not sata, so this should be very slow pc...

I've got that on my windows 2000 machine except 20gb hard disk, and it runs Live For Speed fine!!!!!! - Never had stuttering
Also that computer is with a Radeon 9550

FWIW, I also have stuttering.

XP Media edition
Athalon XP 3500+
was onboard ATI X200 256 Mb shared
now ATI X1650 pci-e
1 gig unknown RAM
Compaq off-the-shelf system

It must be something to do with the system messages when someone joins the track. If I shift (-) the messages off, I get NO stuttering. If I leave the system messages on, it stutters.

I also deleted the system and the chat message sound and chat has been quiet for me for years, so that's another variable that shouldn't be a cause of the problem.

I had stuttering in windows itself also. When playing back video files it would stutter and skip frames every now and then. When playing music it would also stutter. This was with XP Sp2 fully updated. Now running Vista without any problems so far. Much smoother as well then the previous XP install fully patched up. My guess is it's the damn windows updates that have something to do with it.

It is xp only...
If someone has vista and it has that problem... then that is not the reason

SOLVED!!!

Solution
I would recomend reinstalling xp with sp2 and don't install any updates or just upgrade to vista

P.S. If you get Vista make sure you have a few days off from work etc, it takes a while to get the programs compatible

Cya,
James

Quote from Jamesisinthehouse12 :

Solution
I would recomend reinstalling xp with sp2 and don't install any updates or just upgrade to vista

Lol, yeah, sure. Vista isn't going near my computer any time soon, thanks.

Quote from STROBE :

Lol, yeah, sure. Vista isn't going near my computer any time soon, thanks.

Why?

It has had less errors than when xp came out (xp had 32 and vista had 14)
I'm using the vista sp1 beta - it has boosted the performance heaps!!!!!!!!!!!
It should have been this good when vista was released!!!!!!!

But...
P.S. If you get Vista make sure you have a few days off from work etc, it takes a while to get the programs compatible

Quote from Jamesisinthehouse12 :

Why?

It has had less errors than when xp came out (xp had 32 and vista had 14)
I'm using the vista sp1 beta - it has boosted the performance heaps!!!!!!!!!!!
It should have been this good when vista was released!!!!!!!

But...
P.S. If you get Vista make sure you have a few days off from work etc, it takes a while to get the programs compatible

Upgrading to Vista/Linux/Symbian etc. is not solving any problems. LFS is not about being Vista-only compatible.

That being said, does anyone who uses Vista get stutters? If not, then it's a XP issue, to some degree at least, probably or quite certainly .

I'm running XP with all the patches and I get stutters.

Vista in no way runs faster, ie running SuperPi on 2 clean installs shows XP to be the quicker by 0.5 seconds...

Quote from Jakg :

Vista in no way runs faster, ie running SuperPi on 2 clean installs shows XP to be the quicker by 0.5 seconds...

Sp1 isn't reased yet tho... but the beta is fast - did it try with the sp1 beta?

I haven't tried the SP1 beta yet, but this clean copy had the memory management updates on it...

Vista won't ever be as quick as XP, but it's getting closer.

Quote from mrodgers :

FWIW, I also have stuttering.


I also deleted the system and the chat message sound and chat has been quiet for me for years, so that's another variable that shouldn't be a cause of the problem.

Could you let me know how to do tis please? I find that noise so annoying and would love to get rid of it.
Thanks Toddshooter

I am NOT going to install Vista on my machine to solve a problem that shouldn't and wasn't there in the first place, and I sure as heck ain't reinstalling windows............

Quote from Toddshooter :

Could you let me know how to do tis please? I find that noise so annoying and would love to get rid of it.
Thanks Toddshooter

Look in the LFS folder system with Windows Explorer, find the files and press the little button on your keyboard, that may look similar to all your other buttons, but has hieroglyphics that look like this --> Delete



Er.... it's the message.wav and sysmessage.wav files in the LFS>Data>sound folder. Just change the name extension to message.old or similar so you don't have to hunt copies down if you want them back. Though, once you hear the glory of silent chat, you'll never want them again. I haven't heard chat sounds in over 2 years .

Quote from Jakg :

Vista in no way runs faster, ie running SuperPi on 2 clean installs shows XP to be the quicker by 0.5 seconds...

Superpi dick measuring software means jackall. I can actually feel the difference in loading times of programs and using the interface.

Maybe its somthing to do with skins ... a bit of a wild guess, its either that or the change in max player on servers ... i really cant remember what stage this "bug" became more pronounced. Somewhere from late V patch - current version.

Is Any Data written to HD when someone leaves pits ?
I should check CPU IO meter really as well , there is definately somthing wierd happening. Perhaps i might spend this day investigating

It is the most annoying bug in LFS imo.

Perhaps it's not pronounced for people that don't automatically record multiplayer replays?

One way to sort of snoop out if it's disk-induced would be to turn on filemon by sysinternals and watch the activity whenever someone joins - see if there's some sort of redundant activity (like multiple files opening and closing) or some massive writing to a particular file.

well Ive now got 3 installations , Just been racing around on the CTRA Server 2, with Fresh Install of LFS (VerX) which then prompted to auto install X10 so i did, before joinng any server i switched off Auto downloading skins , and hey presto ... no stuttering.

So its seems it is skin related, will test with this install a bit more
Find out if its a file size issue, does LFS convert to jpg > DDS as soon as a player connects ? or if LFS.exe restarted ?

But first some coffee

Quote from Gener_AL (UK) :

i switched off Auto downloading skins , and hey presto ... no stuttering

Nobody else had tried this so far? That's weird...

Quote from xaotik :

Nobody else had tried this so far? That's weird...

Nope, haven't tried it. But like I said earlier, shift (-) to disable system messages solved any stutter for me. So, if disabling skin downloading or system messages solves the stutter, I'd assume it has to do with the messages from announcing the skin downloading when a player joins the track as both has solved it from 2 different users.

Does LFS parse the contents of skins/ skins_x/ etc to a textfile ? (looked and can't see anything) maybe its this part of the checking of directories thats causing this lag, it seems possible that the longer/older the installed version has a large amount of skins to check against as a racer leaves the pit, causing this lag ?

slightly off topic:
Been thinking about the skin system, would be nice to have the option to use manual commands to download them
e.g.
/skins alll (dload all skins)
/skins <username;username> (dload user skin, more then one use ; to seperate names)
/skins server (check list of skins loaded on server/users)

or maybe a button next to username in "n" menu, other ideas that spring to mind , maybe have LFSW buddies option, if user on server is on that list download the appropiate skin?

it's good to shut down your browser(s) as well, self-refreshing websites such as lfs-world may cause stutters too

Quote from mrodgers :

Look in the LFS folder system with Windows Explorer, find the files and press the little button on your keyboard, that may look similar to all your other buttons, but has hieroglyphics that look like this --> Delete

Smartass!!

Quote :

Er.... it's the message.wav and sysmessage.wav files in the LFS>Data>sound folder. Just change the name extension to message.old or similar so you don't have to hunt copies down if you want them back. Though, once you hear the glory of silent chat, you'll never want them again. I haven't heard chat sounds in over 2 years .[/

Thank you