Periodic freezing of Celestia

[Chuft-Captain]

Please help me out with this issue if you have any ideas or experience of it. I would have posted this in the Bugs Forum but I don't believe it's a bug in Celestia because, for a start, it happens in multiple versions of Celestia.

Basically, what's been happening for long time now on my machine is that Celestia every few seconds will freeze and then catch up again. It's like something on the machine is periodically stealing processor time from Celestia, and is very disconcerting.
Please observe the attached video which sort of shows what it looks like: Click Here (1MB)
(The video capture probably exaggerates the effect somewhat...in really it pauses for only a fraction of a second, but it's still very disconcerting.)

I have always put this down to having picked up some sort of virus which is interfering with the processor, but I have quite a strong up-to-date VIRUS checker and the system appears clean.
Alternatively, some sort of background process or system-tray process is periodically taking over. -- I've tested this theory as much as I can by killing off as many processes as possible using Task Manager, with no change to Celestia's behaviour.

The other thing that makes me suspect a virus/trojan is that if I have the volume on the machine turned up, I occasionally will hear a short "squelching" sound of about 1/2 second duration-- I don't know how to describe it exactly, but if you've got it, you'll know what I mean.
(I call this the "squelch virus", but I'm not at all sure what the cause of this sound is, or whether it's even a virus or something else.)
Has anyone else heard the "squelch virus"?

Notwithstanding all the above, I'm starting to suspect some sort of hardware fault.

I would however be very interested in finding out if anyone else has experienced any of the symptoms above, and if anyone has any theories.

It's really frustrating that my Celestia acts like this all the time so I'd really like to finally get to the bottom of this, so please help if you can.

Cheers
CC

[BobHegwood]

Chuft?
You lost me with the video. I didn't see any pausing at all.

On my Vista system, however, Celestia does pause all the time.
It does this when I have either a VT planet being explored, or
if I'm looking at an area in space where a lot of clusters and/or
galaxies have to be re-shuffled around based on the new
viewpoint I'm trying to get to.

The system pauses in order to re-calculate the thousands
and/or millions of points it needs to display. I thought that
this was normal. The FPS drop also.

Is this what you are talking about?

Thanks, Brain-Dead

[Chuft-Captain]

Chuft?
You lost me with the video. I didn't see any pausing at all.

None at all? .. it's quite subtle... if in fact the video is absolutely smooth for you, then that's further evidence that perhaps there's something wrong with (or interfering with) my display hardware. It certainly doesn't play back smoothly on my machine.
It's looking more and more like my whole system is doing a stutter!

On my Vista system, however, Celestia does pause all the time.
It does this when I have either a VT planet being explored, or
if I'm looking at an area in space where a lot of clusters and/or
galaxies have to be re-shuffled around based on the new
viewpoint I'm trying to get to.

The system pauses in order to re-calculate the thousands
and/or millions of points it needs to display. I thought that
this was normal. The FPS drop also.

Is this what you are talking about?

No, that's perfectly normal, which is why I chose a view of the earth with not much in view in terms of addons.

Cheers
CC

[selden]

CC,

How many CPUs (cores) does your computer have?
I often see brief pauses on my system, too. It has only a single CPU, although with multithreading.

Look to see what background programs are running.
Open Windows Task Manager, select the Processes tab, select the label at the top of the CPU column twice. That will order the processes so that the one using the most CPU cycles is at the top. You'll see the order change as the various programs run briefly.
If your computer has only one CPU, whenever one of them runs, it has to steal cycles from Celestia.

[Guckytos]

Perhaps a dumb question, but did you also experience those pauses when you have turned your antivirus software off? Of course you should only do so when disconnected from the net.

Perhaps the antivirus is set to scan everything that is put into memory? That could perhaps explain something.

Haven't heard about problems like this with AV software lately, but in earlier times it sometimes happend.

To further seldens idea, you should get the program "Process explorer" from Microsoft, it has even more options to look at processes.

Regards,

Guckytos

[Chuft-Captain]

Tried all those already. (I wouldn't have posted if I hadn't already exhausted all those options ).
It turns out that it's a memory problem, not a processor problem. ie. I was just using too much memory.
I shut down the programs using most of the memory (browser etc.), and everything runs smoothly again.
I would guess that I was just getting into a page-swapping situation because of the lack of physical memory available.

Thanks guys.