CPU % & FPS Drop Every 20 Seconds...

I seem to be having the strangest issue with my game..

Every 20 seconds.. like clockwork... the game's CPU % drops (appearing to use less CPU as even if i look at the profile, everything 'drops' like it's not being used as much) which seems like it means it would be a boost in performance due to less CPU %...

but the issue is the FPS also drop to just over half from ~60 to ~35.... i've tried disabling things like enemy spawning, and other timed events so literally its just the player standing in the middle of the map with nothing happening around him and every 20 seconds it happens... FPS drops and CPU% drops. lasts about 5 seconds and then goes back up to about 20% cpu (from about 8-12) and the FPS goes back up to ~60...

Has anyone ever experienced anything like this? I've disabled a bunch of systems to see which one is possibly causing this.. my next session will be me sitting down and stripping out sprite by sprite to see if that helps pinpoint the issue... but it seems so paradoxical... wouldnt the CPU dropping mean an increase in FPS not a decrease?

Any help would be huge...

Thank you so so much!

Nate

Well, i can confirm that even after stripping everything out of the game, it still happens.. i can also confirm it happens with any of the basic scirra demos... so im guessing this is a computer issue not a game issue.

Is there a background process that's using the CPU? If so it could slow down your game periodically. Open task manager and see if there's a momentary spike in CPU usage for the overall system.

Ya, that does sound like some other program is running that might slow down your computer. In the debug mode, during the drop period, was there any consistent increase in object counts, collision checks or something else that might look suspicious? If not, it might really be an external problem.

Nope no significant increases actually the part that weirded me out is that everything actually DROPPED during those FPS drops. Like CPU usage for the game dropped, and all the individual group CPU% dropped as well.

I just did a fresh reboot and things seem to be a stable ~60FPS ... i spent 3 damn hours on this yesterday. Just goes to show... i donno. something...

thanks for the help dudes

Glad to hear you solved your problem. Actually something similar happened to me as well. My game that ran smoothly suddenly went all laggy. I tried every saved file of that game project, and everyone of them were lagging. I opened another project file, and it was fine. I started fearing the worse, thinking that my entire project had been corrupted. But after a computer reboot, everything went back to normal. ......that was surely a heart stopping experience.