Intermittently slow/stuttery/choppy gameplay. Only sometimes

[tfabris]

Agreed that Ethernet+Corp and Wifi+Home are different situations.

Thinking back, I did have the problem occur, and did do some of the diagnostic troubleshooting on this problem, when it was connected via ethernet at my desk. However there is a chance that at that time it was dual-homed, connected via both ethernet and Wifi simultaneously. So there is still some investigation and experimentation to be done here.

Right now the evidence points to something that it can do on my home wifi, but can't do through the corp network at work. The corp network is not locked down much... I can pretty much reach any kind of internet service I want to reach from there.

I don't believe that I have any services running which would invite other devices on the network to connect to this laptop to accomplish a periodic task. I have a Synology NAS where I keep video and audio files, but I don't believe that...

Wait... The Synology NAS has an iTunes server feature which I think I turned on. I hardly ever use iTunes except to back up my phone (I don't buy or use music or videos in iTunes, I'm strictly a non-DRM mp3-only guy), but I do make sure that iTunes is installed on my system cuz my phone needs it. I know that iTunes has a crapload of little services it installs, most of which I tried killing when I was doing all the task-kill diagnosis earlier. Some of those itunes services came back after I killed them. Wonder if it's one of those. But why would itunes make my game hitch and perfcap? The game should be totally unrelated to itunes. Still, worth investigating.

[tfabris]

I still haven't narrowed down what's causing the issue. On a hunch, I tried deinstalling the Apple "Bonjour" service because that sometimes gave me other unrelated troubles, I thought maybe it was related, but it had no effect on the problem. My next step is to try disabling the other services that Apple installs like the iTunes Service and the Apple Mobile Device Service.

I'm down to the last boss in Grimrock 2, so if I defeat him within the next day or two, I likely won't be doing much more Grimrock-related diagnosis after this. If the issue is a noticeable problem in other video games, I'll need to continue the diagnostic steps and get to the bottom of it. But I spend most of my gaming time on consoles rather than PC, so it might be a while before I get back to diagnosing this. Depends on whether any more "must-play" PC exclusive games like Grimrock 2 come up on Steam.

[tfabris]

Okay, it doesn't seem to matter if I'm connected wired ethernet or WiFi... the problem exists either way. But I still think it happens more often on my home network than on my work network. Still can't be certain because of the random nature of the problem.

I tried stopping and disabling all of these services at different times and none of them had any effect:
Bonjour
Apple Mobile Device
Bluetooth OBEX service
Bluetooth Device Monitor
Bluetooth Support Service
Google Update Service (gupdate)
Google Update Service (gupdatem)
HomeGroup Listener
HomeGroup Provider
iPod service
NVidia Network Service
Windows Search
Print Spooler

I'm wondering if there's any way to run Grimrock without running STEAM. I wonder if it's Steam that's the culprit. If I terminate Steam, then Grimrock terminates as well and of course the problem goes away instantly when a 3D game isn't running.

[Dr.Disaster]

I'm wondering if there's any way to run Grimrock without running STEAM. I wonder if it's Steam that's the culprit. If I terminate Steam, then Grimrock terminates as well and of course the problem goes away instantly when a 3D game isn't running.

You can run Steam in Offline mode so it won't do any of it's regular background stuff.

[tfabris]

Nope, it's not Steam. I just saw the same thing happen when running Crysis, which is a disc-installed game, Steam was completely exited. Again, the game ran fine for a while and then the "Util" perfcap occurred.

Of course, Crysis pushes the GPU and memory controller load up to 99 percent, which is more than Grimrock does. But it ran fine that way for quite some time before the perfcap occurred, and the GPU temp got up to 76c and held that way for a while before the perfcap occurred. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the temp or the load that made the Util perfcap occur, otherwise (a) it would have done it sooner and (b) I've had both the memory and GPU loads maxed out in tests before, and been at higher temps, and not had the perfcap occur. Oh, and (c) I think that if perfcap occurs due to temperature, it's a different perfcap reason rather than "Util".

Problem is, when the perfcap thing happened in Crysis, it just "stayed bad" after the problem started. It didn't recover itself after a minute like it did when I was playing Grimrock 2.