On Sat, 20 Oct 2018 09:25:31 +0100, Paul wrote:

Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:


It happens with more than one program, but The Sims 3 is the prime example.

At first, Google wouldn't show me anything related to Sims 3.
But after fiddling with search terms a bit, I found something
which at least mentions a few file names.

"The Sims 3 | Performance & Bug Fix Guide 2018"

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfil...?id=1131162350

There's no direct mention of your problem, but
consider that:

1) The game needs to SaveState when you close it.
It's a simulation that will want to "pick up
where it left off". It needs to save many aspects
of graphics output and system state (where all the
duff cars and taxis are located that nobody is using).

2) There are "cache" files, the cache files get
larger with time. The cache files are re-generated
at startup, which takes more time if you erased them (bad).
But having smaller cache files may speed up SaveState (good).

So that's the only thing I spotted so far. You don't have
to delete anything to start with, but you could have a look at
the named files to see if they're huge or not.

The next time
you quit the SIMS 3, watch your disk drive activity light
on the computer case, and see if it says lit solid until
the game finally exits. That would imply the caches are
huge.

I think it did stay lit, but that could be paging as it only has 4GB RAM.

Correction - very little disk activity, 43% CPU usage (of 4 cores).

"The cache files that are safe to delete after
everytime playing the game are...

- compositorCache.package
- CasPartCache.package
- scriptCache.package
- simCompositorCache.package
- socialCache.package

Deleting these files before running the game will
make the game run smoother.
"

If the game needs to save out the cache files after
you tell it to "quit", that's why the game cannot
quit 20 microseconds later. Rather than a system resource,
it's a game resource that requires protection.

If you want to delete those five files, you'd do it
while the game wasn't running.

In Task Manager, the game apparently runs ts3.exe and ts3w.exe.

And because some of the users are fiddling with "affinity" setting
when the executable starts, apparently it doesn't handle
"a lot of CPU cores" well. On a dual core E8400 you
likely wouldn't have to do anything to it. There have
been games in the past, that crash if the affinity
is above 1. Setting affinity is likely a "bitmap",
so a value of 3 is a mask of 0011 binary and would
limit program execution to the CPU0 and CPU1 cores.
A value of 7 would limit execution to the first
three cores 0x0111 etc.

0 0 1 1
-------
C C C C
P P P P
U U U U
3 2 1 0

On WinXP, the affinity mask maximum width is limited to
32 cores and would look like 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0011.
If you owned an AMD Epyc processor, you'd need to define
the whole thing.

This is what WinXP Affinity looks like in Task Manager, but
that "start" example supports doing this dialog from the
command line. In this example, the processor only has two
cores, and both cores are candidates to run the program in
question (the one you'd be setting affinity on).

https://cloud.addictivetips.com/wp-c...08/11/core.jpg

On Windows 10, I think the max cores the OS can use is 256,
so the affinity mask would be really really wide.

Anyway, when playing a favorite game, that's the kind of
web page you want to find. One with plenty of meat to it.