Even in the countryside, with nothing, nor no one around, every few minutes the FPS will drop from 30+/- to zero and the screen will freeze for five to ten seconds. When this occurs, the CPU activity drops dramatically and I do not hear any hard drive activity.
Anecdotally, the game seems more likely to do this when the character is running, or jogging, but it can happen at any time.
The game has always done this, but it seems to be particularly bad with this build.
Log into a server.
I previously had an issue with (presumably) textures loading, which would cause the FPS to periodically drop dramatically. Standing in the countryside, with nothing, nor no one around and merely turning my head to look to the side would cause massive hard drive activity and the FPS would drop dramatically. I have since loaded the game onto a SSD and I no longer experience that problem.
The game was originally on a Western Digital Black 7500RPM drive. It is now on a Samsung 840 EVO SSD.
I was playing on the evening of June 05. This problem became progressively worse, as more players joined the server. At 25-30 players, the problem became quite unpleasant. At 40 players, the freezes were frequent and severe.
Other players must have also had issues at this time, because as soon as the load exceeded 40 players 12-18 players would log out and my symptoms would improve significantly. I saw this cycle repeat itself several times over about a six hour period.
I have the same problem, except the timings are different (for me the game freezes for about a minute every 10 minutes or so). I didn't have this problem with 0.55, it seems to have been introduced with 0.57. I usually play on servers with 40+ people on, not sure if that's relevant. I had thought it was due to my hardware being insufficient (Q6600 2.8ghz, 4bg ram, GTX560).