Some of the features in PlanePlotter are hungry of processing resources. If you experience sluggish behaviour in the PlanePlotter user interface (eg. sticky mouse), it may pay you to look closely at your settings, to see what might be changed, to reduce the processor load.
A significant part of the load is related to the number of active aircraft. That depends partly on the number of aircraft you are receiving with your own receiver, of course, but it also depends on the number of aircraft acquired by sharing. If you reduce the geographical area covered by the chart, or outline, on the screen, then the number of aircraft downloaded will be reduced. This, in turn, will eventually reduce the demands made on the processor. It will also reduce your Internet bandwidth, which might be important.
Similarly, the number of active aircraft can become unnecessarily large if you have very long Omit/Delete times. Keeping those times short, will remove obsolete plots and hence save processing power. Options..Chart..Options.
When the option to make more creative aircraft symbols was introduced, I made the point that it will increase the processing load, especially if you have lots of aircraft on display. Simply deleting all the files called planesymbol[*].txt from the application directory, will cause PP to revert to the original arrow-like symbols with a significant saving on processor load.
Depending on the type of receiver, PlanePlotter may offer two or three different log file formats. Each one will add something to the processing load so turning them off, if you don't need them, will reduce the load somewhat. I often smile when people complain about massive log files that they did not want, when turning them off is one click. Options..I/O settings and File..Report..Setup.
I have been surprised at the number of users who have enabled Google-Earth and TCP servers but who make no use of those features. The G-E server, in particular, is very thirsty of processing power, so unless you are actually using Google-Earth as a display means, turn that server off in Options..I/O settings.
The time it takes to consult the registration/type database (eg. basestation.sqb) is related to how large the file has become. For reasons that I do not understand, some users have basestation.sqb files that are large enough to contain the world's entire airline fleet several times over. I think they must have enabled some sort of session logging so that all the aircraft appear in the database many times over. Purging such files may not be easy but it would be worth pointing PP to some alternative, more modest, database file (remember that you can switch around which file PP uses for this purpose) to see if it makes a difference to the performance. Options..Directories..SQB database.
Mapping a regular chart into a prespective view as seen from an aircraft cockpit, is very demanding. If you find it makes your processor struggle, turn it off.
The recent Aircraft View (a) window and the Vignette View (v) necessarily involve processing the current aircraft more than once. If opening these windows makes the processor struggle, close them.
There are two kinds of "other stuff".
Programs that interact with PlanePlotter, either directly or indirectly can increase the processing load. With an external script controlling PP through the OLE/COM interface, it would be possible to make it work very hard indeed. The scripts that the late Curt Deegan and others have kindly made available, are aware of this and exercise appropriate restraint in what they ask PP to do. Other scripts and home brew modificiations to the available scripts may not be so considerate.
Given that PP interacts with the registration/type database (eg. basestation.sqb), then intensive manipulation of that database by some other application, could slow PP down consinderably. You could test this hypothesis by making a copy of the database and pointing PP to the one that the other application is not accessing. Options..Directories..SQB database.
Applications that do not interact with PlanePlotter at all, can still absorb considerable resources, leaving insufficient left for PP to do its work. The Task Manager is your friend here. It will show you what each task is consuming. I was astonished just this afternoon to see that Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) was absorbing 50% of the CPU time when all it was doing was displaying a directory. Apparently, if you have the icon/preview displayed in a directory listing, some file types cause Windows Explorer to try to read the whole file looking for an icon or preview. If it is a large file (eg video), it can take forever. This phenomenon happens when you have those files on view in Explorer, without actually doing anything useful with them. Closing idle windows can sometimes make a big difference.