FPS drops and game stuttering (thread starvation)

Game stuttering and frame drops and in the moments of stuttering/drops I did see in the console a message in red spamming "SteamNetworkingSockets lock held for (..) ms (Performance Warning.This is usually a symptom of a general performance problem such as thread starvation." where (..) number would fluctuate anywhere from 1 up to 15.

Console error messages

So ive been playing CSGO for a while now after a long time, and I noticed regular game stuttering and frame drops and in the moments of stuttering/drops I did see in the console a message in red spamming SteamNetworkingSockets lock held for (..) ms (Performance Warning.This is usually a symptom of a general performance problem such as thread starvation where (..) number would fluctuate anywhere from 1 up to 15. At one point during a casual game my fps went down from 280 to 15 and I thought something was wrong with my pc.It made no sense to me since it felt like my system was throttling but temperatures were fine and also CPU/GPU and RAM usage was not out of the ordinary. What was even stranger is that it only happened in CSGO and not in other games.

Things I tried

• validating CSGO files
  
• resetting modem
  
• changing graphic settings
  
• looking up the issue on google for solutions (I found some commands that would hide the error message, but the fps drop issue was still present)
  
• trying several launch options
  
• disable steam overlay ingame
  
• closing internet browser while gaming
  
• fiddling with my ingame rate (since the error said something with network)

and many more things, but I wont go into this because you guys want to know what made the console messages go away right?

None of the things mentioned above worked

What did work?

I was at a point of giving up, and thought this was a game bug and had to live with it until it got fixed. But why would some people get this error message and the stuttering/drops that go along and others dont have a problem at all?

I wanted to try one last thing, and that was closing apps in the taskbar one by one and closing down CSGO and restart it back up again each time with closing down each app.

Nothing changed for the first couple of apps until....jackpot

I closed down the Steelseries GG app in my taskbar and after launching CSGO and tested it ingame and the console messages and stuttering were gone!

My thoughts

It all made sense to me...its an integration issue, these days computer equipment like keyboards, mouse and headsets have their own app and alot of them have an integration functionality with games. In my case Steelseries GG, this app can communicate with steam servers and draw live data like k/d ratio and such from the game and put it on a display. I filed a bug report directly to a Steelseries developer who said to investigate the issue. Just to be clear, this is not an issue from the Steelseries app, its in my understanding a delayed communication issue between the app and the steam servers drawing live data from there. Also it could potentially cause your CPU usage to peak, which affects your game performance.

I looked further and found that another person had this happening due to his Logitech mouse and G Hub app which has a built in CSGO profile with mouse assignments/color/dpi. That person disabled the CSGO profile in G Hub and the stuttering/messages went away.

So if this happened to me in my case due to the Steelseries GG app and to the other person with Logitech G Hub app it could very well be with any other brand of equipment which has an app in the taskbar running that communicates with the steam servers due to a CSGO profile or setting.

I just wanted to share what helped me, to you guys/girls who have similar messages in console and ingame stuttering because it was hard to keep playing CSGO with that issue since it didnt help my aim and crosshair placement.

The fix for me

The fix for me to get rid of the fps drops and stuttering and red console messages :

For now I just close down the Steelseries GG app in the taskbar before I start to play CSGO and the "SteamNetworkingSockets lock held for (..) ms (Performance Warning.This is usually a symptom of a general performance problem such as thread starvation." are not there anymore and with that the frame drops/stuttering went away too. Hopefully eventually there will be a patch from either the app developers or through steam.

I hope this helps someone else too, because especially in CSGO we cannot have stuttering/drops because it really affects our gameplay, at least it did definatly for me and notice its playing much better now.

Happy gaming!

[CaleoGaming]

Sadly didn't help me :(