Roughly since a month (maybe a bit longer, shortly before the 3p open beta build was introduced i think) we saw a massive decline in performance stability. Not the average performance (at least not that i can tell) is affected here. Anytime something happens, random things, onscreen effects from games, toggles, switches, anything really, there doesn't seem to be any pattern behind it (that i could notice) VRChat will completely freeze, not just hitch for a moment but completely lock up entirely, up to several seconds sometimes. I can see in the Steam Overlay that Steam (and everything else) continues to work just fine with no hitches at all. I cannot determine why exactly it has been happening though i noticed that turning down (to Errors Only) or entirely off Debugging does help a bit, it does not fix the constant freezes however. Several many people i know have reported this degrade in performance so i'm confident it isn't just me. I've tested the live build (since a month), the open beta and the third person beta. All of them have this issue and it makes playing quite frankly almost impossible. Things that can cause these massive freezes: Turning off lights (Blackout, Murder, Prison Escape, Among Us) Some avatar effects (Scaling bones + playing a short sound + toggling physbones) Practically any new onscreen effect (text or effects popping up on screen, fade-to-backs when dying) Turning around for a bit and then turning back to face the same avatars Opening any menu that loads a couple images (Groups, Friendlist and several others) Spawning some very light items in some worlds (Pens, Objects, Furniture) The usual (Avatars loading in, lights toggling etc) are amplified (although weirdly enough not as bad as everything else) I would have suspected an issue with logging (though when turning logging off it still happens) and/or the way the strings are gathered and printed but that seemed only part of the issue. Game lobbies are nigh unplayable with the constant freezes. It's not an issue with firewall, defender or antivirus (tested all of them, turned all of them off). The effect is similar as to when you've been logged out of the API while still being online (API calls causing massive stalls of up to 10 seconds). I honestly don't know what to point to other than it wasn't happening ~2 months ago. Its happening everywhere with as little as a single other player in the instance, its hard to miss it. Hardware has not changed, drivers and software has not changed, its repeatedly reported by many people with hardware reaching into the high-end bracket. My only wild guess i have at this point is that the avatar optimization (single pass shaders) is getting reapplied aggressively after a short while. Usually when something requires shaders to switch to two passes (thus undoing the optimization), such as being lit by a realtime light, it stays unoptimized until (presumably) being reloaded (or possibly only after switching/rejoining worlds). My guess is that the switch back to single pass is being reapplied very aggressively here, which (if the previously compiled single pass or two pass shaders aren't cached) would cause a massive freeze as shaders are getting recompiled live. This would explain most if not all the cases in which these freezes seem to happen.
