Fix game stutter on Win 10 1703-1809

https://i.imgur.com/q5T6Nni.png

People seem to subtly imply that I'm accusing you of something. Remember, I was the first one who called for giving you the benefit of the doubt when you joined here wagnard and people were accusing you of trying to infect people with malware with ddu, until haggard came in and told people to put the hayforks down.

I'm merely asking a perfectly reasonable question. This ip doesn't have a fqdn attached to it btw.

 

That's just the thing - to achieve those large memory pages and fast large caches of non-zeroed memory (because you overwrite it afterwards anyway) - you need admin rights. Games usually requests this one time at installation, and you don't need to run as admin from then on. So the waters are already muddied. That stupid daemon was basically stealing what was supposed to be a fixed private cache time and time again, so the game had to reallocate memory and repopulate it from disk with whatever resource should have been there (ui, map, intermezzo).
Not sure what happened in BF1, but for DOTA that forcefully freed standby memory could not be re-allocated, it was rendered useless, and while task manager was showing gigabytes of ram used with most of it in standby list, in-game the console was screaming low memory warnings.

Yeah, great point to make, that's what I meant but poorly expressed with "asking the driver to do it for them" - detours, dx, vc++, .net crt - all had the chance of being affected. Nvidia clearly was doing something to trigger it driver-side, unlike AMD. No surprise looking at their history with optimus, if I'm not mistaken, also beeing the worse on 1703 and 1709.

Yes.
And it's not just standby memory, but all sorts of low-level memory allocations (for example large pages) that affect drivers and enthusiast applications like games, compilers, archivers, encoders.
Potatoes (most intel before Haswell refresh) should stay away from windows 10 versions between 1607 and 1903, you never know when a memory bug will bite you - getting pwned, losing data in the worst case, to increased ssd wear, thermal wear and stutters in game.

@Prophet
Cannot replicate with the official download link digitally signed ‎Thursday, ‎February ‎13, ‎2020 6:18:30 PM having SHA1: f209298df201dd9722dd1d92e4215310f12e282a
You probably have a hijacked version
or something else on your PC is taking advantage of the tool working with admin rights, to extrude data from your pc.
Or your firewall monitor is whack and mis-atributes your porn viewing to ISCL.
That ip is usually involved with porn ads.
See Wagnard's reply below, it's indeed comodo CA no idea why it showed as a something else when I queried it - dead wrong.

In any case, this is why I only share text scripts when it comes to windows tweaking.
There is zero reasons for pre-compiled tools offering windows tweaks even if source code would be available.
Can very well release a powershell script with an on-the-fly gui, can compile c# on the fly if needing more speed, can digitally sign the script. You don't need to worry about others "stealing" your work, it's not like you're doing something so original and outlandish that you need to copyright it - you use documentation that microsoft and the community published. If it's good people will genuinely support you.

 

I was just wondering if you still use the standbylist cleaner in w10/2004, or if it does more "harm" than actually helping?
Specifically speaking in games.
So i'm not sure if this mem cache clearing tool is needed in the newest version, nor have i tested it really, i guess a non flushed cache would lead to stuttering and things like that.

I'd appreciate some input, just trying to keep my background apps down to a minimum while playing, and if one is not needed on my system and does more harm than good, i'd love to know. :]

 

Yeah I remember all, and I am gratefull that you came informing me about this.
About the IP, I found out earlier that it is the IP of ocsp.comodoca4.com the digital signer of the certificate and it is normal that Windows will check it's authenticity online.

 

Are 1803 and 1809 or 1909 safer then?

 

@Smough 1803 and 1809 are pretty much ok in regards to standby memory but for some hardware (like I said pre <4xxx intel) are not safe due to other memory bugs. 1903+ are so far free of any memory bugs.

@BlackNova92
before the bug was fixed the benefit of using standby cleaners clearly out-weighted the detriments.
Now that windows manages standby properly, cleaners may do more harm than good,
potentially reducing the snappiness of multitasking and increasing the ssd wear,
because windows will still slowly fill up the cache up to 50% of installed ram size
with various mapped files depending on your usage - program assets, media, mounted archives etc.
I have observed it thoroughly and have not found so far locked standby memory on 1903+,
Windows is correctly prioritizing it, and more importantly, re-purposing it when under low free memory.

But I'm not yet sold on windows decisions as to what to cache and for how long.
Contrary to the mantra of free ram is wasted ram, zeroed ram is more often than not more useful than standby ram.
Enthusiasts can still milk single app performance specially if running on potatoes with less than 8GB and slow RAM.
But the clearing standby memory daemon must be more intelligent.
@Wagnard is on the right track with the added option for manual exclusions!
What's missing is a built-in whitelist of stuff needed by windows that refills the standby list often,
and / or dynamically excluding processes by cpu user/kernel time utilization.
Will also check if it's achievable.

I would say, give the new Windows version a try without any "performance" tweaks for at least couple weeks.
People often don't, and apply outdated stuff from 9x/xp/7 immediately giving mixed good & bad results.

 

As @AveYo said, dont use ISLC (or other list cleaner) if you dont have any issues.
ISLC (and others) will only eat CPU cycle for nothing and you will clear a *cache* that could be more useful filled than cleared.
So use this only when needed.

 

thank you for the big chunk of information there, so i guess i'll just use the timer-resolution tool from now on then(even that, i don't really think it is needed anymore, since openening a game will instantly bring it down to 0.5ms, correct me if i'm wrong)
again, i really appreaciate it

 

Hi all, the Option 1: Script: FreeStandbyMemory.bat by AveYo, ¿u must run every time u restart or turn on the or with one time is enought?

 

They just said that you only must run it if you have stuter issues in games, if you don't, it does more harm than good. Each time you clean the standby list, you force either your SSD or HDD to do more I/O work due to the lack of RAM in standby. There are 2 Windows versions with this problem: 1703 and much worse, 1709. 1709 needs it all of the time because its kernel its broken. Some users don't need it on 1709, but I would not risk it. Apparently 1607 is free of this problem, as any version 1803+, so you could try any of those. 1803 imo is one of the best versions out there, I am not entirely happy with 1809. According to what Aveyo said, the only versions completely patched is any from 1903 and upwards, but I myself don't have any issues at 1809 and I didn't have any at 1803 updated either. (Use the MS Update catalog and update 1803 to version KB4458469 (compilation O.S 17134.320).

If you still want to run it, use this before you start any game: https://wj32.org/wp/software/empty-standby-list/

 

Ah ok, thanks for the explain.

 

Considering your whole existence at this forum its based on subtle trolling (because I refuse to believe most of what you say is serious), it amazes me that Wagnard is even listening to anything you have to say.

 

Another concern: Ironically, you and others in here are the only persons that could ever give me a sane, normal answer, as even in the MS Directx Discord they seem to ignore this question, which is pathetic, to say the least. Do you know why after 1803, the Queryperformancefrequency is now all of a sudden 10 MHz and not 3.something MHz anymore? Some users say it gives them worse latency or system slowdown, this is not my case, but a lot of users went full paranoid with this. Did MS did it for any reason in particular to improve anything? If it even improves something.

 

because the timers are virtualized now iirc.

 

So does that make things better, "worse" or equal? Virtualized does not mean slower? Sorry if I may seem ignorant on this subject, never knew a lot about virtualization.

 

the jury is out on that, nobody really knows.

 

Now that's touching a sensitive matter.
CPU vulnerabilities (Meltdown, Spectre, SSB, MDS) are no joke and should be patched on internet-facing devices.
But many people don't believe they will ever be hacked (are viruses even real?!), and will rather retain their 100%
system performance by not applying bios updates, windows microcode updates and mitigations, not using AVs.

Intel have screamed their lungs out that "for typical usage" there's 0% to at most 3-5% loss in storage speed,
when in fact it can go up to 15-17% loss for some workloads as seen in their own slideshows..
Independent researchers not yet paid by Intel to spew PR on the internet also found much higher numbers
in actual "typical usage" - it's naive to think that turning the prefetching mechanisms into garbage tier
would not affect just about everything on older series of cpu's without redesigned hardware.

Although you can disable some mitigations via the registry, you can't do the same for those incorporated
into windows components starting with 1803. So that's why many avid gamers still swear by 1703 or 1709
as best for gaming despite their other shortcomings mentioned in this topic. Technically can be faster.
Not to mention that those running AMD, get the Intel-only fixes just the same and it rubs them the wrong way.

I personally think it's just pissing against the wind, as most drivers and programs compiled after 2018
incorporate mitigations that makes them a bit slower. That's just harsh reality.
But hey, if ignoring online security is what gives some +1% avg fps, who am I to judge?
Maybe they make a living from streaming online games on their potato, and they've taken precautions
like running deep freeze, only run few programs, browse few websites, use tight 2fa authentication and so on.
Or maybe they are already part of a botnet and just don't know, don't care.

TLDR: windows versions starting with 1803 incorporate some CPU vulnerabilities mitigations that can't be turned off

 

I kind of suspected this, thanks for confirming it. The Physics benchmark scores I have on earlier windows (1709 & 1607), I can never beat them unless I add ~150mhz to the OC. However the Graphics score after HAGS is also something unachievable on older builds for me.

Also even on v2004, it turned out I needed ISLC for horizon zero dawn (16GB ram).

 

So with HAGS you got much more higher graphic scores? As for ISLC, if you have a system with properly updated drivers, it has not been needed since 1803 update and upwards, but as the saying goes, you milleanage may vary. 1709 is a garbage Windows version because it depends on ILSC; I believe 1703 and 1607 didn't. 1607 is the most liked version for power users and those who want low latency and no security patches mitigations.

 

I guess it must be hard to have such an inflated view of your own opinions.