Superfetch and Runonce CTD

[EntropyZ]

I was hesitant to create an account, I usually solve all of my problems by myself but the fixes never end up leaving my lips, so I guessed this is a good place as any to discuss something I have been living with for 2-3 years now. It's been 6 years since I started modding the Elder Scrolls games to my liking and I have put blood, sweat and tears into getting everything to work without crashes, and I know I am not alone.

 

It's strange that this type of CTD isn't documented... at all... anywhere...

 

Here's the situation, it's been only 2 years since I modded Skyrim a little bit more heavier the biggest change so far was the switch from T3nd0's Skyrim Redone to Requiem - The Roleplaying Overhaul for obvious reasons. With any 2K texture packs added Skyrim and Windows start not getting along too well.

 

Now I have noticed something very peculiar, but first I'm going to clear the air here a bit.

No, I am not hitting the 3.1GB limit and never will.

No, Overclocking doesn't change overall game/OS stability in my case.

No, I am not running an SSD and I know that the switch from HDD helps greatly.

No, this has nothing to do with mod conflicts I am 99.9% sure.

Yes, I am using Windows 8.1 and I know that some computers that run Skyrim have a problem with that.

Yes, I have researched and observed what Superfetch does.

Yes, I have tried loading mods one by one to find out what exactly causes the crash and came up with the same conclusion.

Yes, I am using SKSE 1.7.2 beta and ENBoost to alleviate the CTD and ILS.

Yes, most of the main stuff used to run Skyrim comes from the S.T.E.P guide.

Yes, the CTD is random but happens most often if I spend a lot of time in intense outdoor cells.

Yes, I am using a bashed, merged and skyproc patches and set them up correctly to reduce the chance of conflicts.

System specs are posted as a signature, this problem seems very tied to OS and my system.

I have switched my system to Intel because I saw 15-25% increase in performance during gaming, I did this mostly for Skyrim, I trusted the benchmarks on the internet and they were right for the most part. One more thing, Skyrim doesn't know how to use more than 2 threads so the processor wasn't even hitting 60% usage, OC'ing CPU showed almost no performance increase which was pathetic on an AMD, the FX 8350 showed similar results and almost any 2nd gen Intel puts AMD's CPU's to shame on games like this. Intel on the other hand shows large increases in FPS on and off OC, which is expected considering that its single thread performance was/is awesome.

To be honest this whole thing could be just be in it's own thread because of derailment.

Turbo clocks aren't used because of console/pc port syndrome, which is still being debated. I am still holding a grudge against Bethesda Softworks for releasing the game with old technologies and old engine. (I've seen Boris, the creator of ENB saying in his forum posts what he thinks about the state of things and they are just as negative.) Hell I sometimes think Oblivion looked better in some cases and it didn't even have problems with shadows if I recall correctly, the first thing I have noticed when playing vanilla Skyrim for the first time was its ugly shadows and lighting. Also I found the use of DX9 renderer unacceptable for a PC game back in 2011. These are major flaws that left a stigma to this day. Only after 2013 is when I found Skyrim's graphics bearable but I have to use mods to do that, oh and one more thing... lots of different meshes loaded seem to destroy a lot of lower end CPU's and the FPS suffers, I found that out the hard way after only loading SMIM and a town/village mod. There's absolutely nothing that would shut me up at this point, the game still is one of my top poorly optimized games that I ever played with or without mods. The modding community is always the one that has to pick up the pieces and I thank those brave souls who make our experiences (for better or worse) amazing.

The CTD can happen 1-5 hours gameplay hours apart but is most prominent after a fresh restart/shutdown. During the gameplay Superfetch is really active and seems to be interfering the whole time. (Superfetch service only runs after I run Skyrim and gives 100% disk activity, I almost never get to see it running with other games for some reason)

 

Note that after the crash, instead of just leaving me at the desktop, Skyrim hangs around until I dismiss the message that Skyrim has stopped working which blames the main Skyrim executable as the fault module. It just leaves me with little to no evidence why the game has crashed. After the dust settles I keep seeing Superfetch running in the background with some CPU usage and then suddenly stopping. This usually only happens once per day, depending on if I restarted the computer. Afterwards the only CTD I would see is back to the normal one that Windows has nothing to do with.

 

I have begun to recognize two types of CTD's, bear with me here. 1) Mod conflict, CTD with no message, just getting my plain desktop and nothing else. 2) Possible memory management CTD, I explained earlier how that goes.

 

Another thing to note is that I have never gotten the CTD with a "Program has stopped working" before on Windows 7, or it was so rare I would just forget about it. And now I remembered that I on some OS re-installs I had Superfetch completely turned off.

 

Currently I have used a registry tweak to allow working only for the OS and not interfere with programs. I use this as a workaround the CTD I am getting, but I want to solve how to get the best of both worlds without sacrificing the ability to use Superfetch for everything.

 

Edit: Turns out setting Superfetch only for booting still makes it run after Skyrim, leading to lag spikes and eventual CTD. Only disabling Superfetch completely acts as a workaround.

 

I will be adding/editing as questions/answers/ideas come and go. Tell me if I missed anything that might feel important.

Edited May 19, 2015 by EntropyZ

[hishutup]

Generally crashes today are related to bad scripting, errors in plugins or memory maxing out and needs to be increased. The memory issue is very apparent when using dyndolod.

To fix that, bump blocks1 to 1024(768) in the skse.INI

 

Another cause may be related to ExpandSystemMemoryX64 being enabled. Theres no hard definitive testing but I can say that it has removed the seemingly random crashes from the game but like I said, its kind of hard to test

[EntropyZ]

Generally crashes today are related to bad scripting, errors in plugins or memory maxing out and needs to be increased. The memory issue is very apparent when using dyndolod.

To fix that, bump blocks1 to 1024(768) in the skse.INI

 

Another cause may be related to ExpandSystemMemoryX64 being enabled. Theres no hard definitive testing but I can say that it has removed the seemingly random crashes from the game but like I said, its kind of hard to test

Thanks for the quick and straightforward reply. I am not a user of dyndolod and wasn't aware of it's existance until now, so I am glad that you pointed that out. Memory blocks log shows that block1 almost never goes past 380-430, while the max size is 768(512).

 

I am running standard uGrids and as few skyrim ini tweaks as possible. My ini files are clean and meant for max performance without sacrificing quality. Those 4 years paid off eventually.

 

I have never tried messing with ExpandSystemMemoryX64 parameter it has always been enabled because I am running a 64-bit OS, Boris and a lot of people recommend leaving it enabled but they also say that it's ok to try and disable it and finding out if it works better or worse for a user.

 

Update: I started a new game which includes DynDOLOD, the memory block usage was around the same as before, but I bumped up both blocks by 256 to be safe. So far everything runs smoothly, but I noticed recently that Whiterun hold is a poor stress testing ground for me because the area has few NPC spawns and generally doesn't have a high resource usage compared to other places.

Edited May 19, 2015 by EntropyZ