This obviously reduces performance and cuts the legs of the CPU, but i had to do it and the freezes are gone

 

I don't recommend any BufferPools tweak because I have seen so many crashes in this forum that was caused by tweaking BufferPools.  The AVSIM FSX Configuration Guide does not recommend it either except for tweaking Autogen.  AVSIM recommends caution and it should be the first thing to look at if you ever experience a crash/freeze.

 

Thanks for posting your solution.

 

Best regards,

Thanks to this community that provides so many ideas and solutions

Please take all of the following with a pinch of salt.

 

It looks to me that 8min freezes can be caused by any (unidentified yet) sim overstress (see note), so it can be PMDG aircrafts or ASN or some traffic addon or heavy/faulty scenery or..... This seems to match the fact that so many users with different sim setups and different machines experience this problem.

After going through Jim's advices, I am still not able to pinpoint the culprit (although I have a "cleaner" sim).

For the last couple of weeks, I am almost  ( :ph34r:) freeze-free with the following basic settings:

• unlimited frames,
• addon scenery only related to the planned flight (all other deactivated),
• FSX on three cores (affinity mask used),
• all other running programs only on the free core (weather addon, maps, EFB).

 

I am not sure (on the contrary) that this will prove bulletproof for ever, but looks fairly ok till now.

 

Whatever triggers the 8min freezes, seems to affect a certain "thing" that takes 8min to recover, regardless of processing power, OS, addons or memory. Unfortunately, no expert yet can identify what can have this "recovery time" of 8 min. If this would be identified, I am sure that someone of all the talented and knowledgeable fellow-simmers could trace back the possible causes. 

 

 

Notes:

• the alleged "overstress" is surely NOT something obvious. It is definitely not VAS, RAM or GPU load.
• During the freeze, I have observed any possible combination of CPU load (all cores idle, any only one fully loaded, two fully loaded). Never seen all three or four fully loaded.