EFB and SimConnect - what's the deal?

[WebMaximus]

Forgive me for a possibly very stupid question but does running EFB in a 2 PCs setup actually require SimConnect? Or to make my question a little bit more detailed, does it require the SimConnect.cfg file on the Display Unit PC and the SimConnect.xml on the Data Provider PC both fully correctly configured with IP address etc?

 

Reason I ask is I have been running EFB for many years now, first in FSX and lately in P3D2.5. After starting to suffer from stuttering issues in P3D 30-60 minutes into a flight I suspected a SimConnect issue where SimConnect maybe was flooded since I'm also using other addons requiring SimConnect such as ActiveSky Next. Someone gave me the tip to check what version(s) of SimConnect I have installed since the information was having multiple versions of SimConnect installed could cause stutters and possibly other issues as well.

 

So for this reason I decided to check out SimConnect in a little bit more detail, did this as part of a clean reinstall of P3Dv2.5 trying to sort the stuttering issues I've experienced. What I found was that after installing P3Dv2.5 I only had one version of SimConnect installed on my P3D PC called Microsoft EFB SimConnect Client v1.0.20.0. This version was apparently installed by the P3Dv2.5 installation program. I later installed vPilot (the VATSIM pilot client) which didn't start successfully complaining about a missing SimConnect version called Microsoft Flight Simulator SimConnect Client v10.0.61259.0. After installing this version of SimConnect on my P3D PC where also the data provider of EFB resides vPilot started successfully and all was good. On my second PC where I'm running the EFB DU I already had Microsoft Flight Simulator SimConnect Client v10.0.61259.0 installed and that's the only version of SimConnect on my second PC.

 

Now to my actual question...what I noticed was that EFB would start and work perfectly fine as far as I could tell even before I configured SimConnect for a networked install using the SimConnect.cfg file on my second PC and the SimConnect.xml file on my main PC. This puzzled me because I didn't think EFB would work in a networked setup without having the correct information in both these files.

 

So right now I'm running EFB without any of these two files and still everything seems to be working just fine. Haven't had time to do an actual flight yet though but I did start up a flight and also connected to VATSIM using vPilot and everything was working perfectly fine showing my correct aircraft location on the airport chart map, displaying online traffic and so on.

 

Sorry for the long post but wanted to give as much detail as possible serving as background to my question...does EFB really need SimConnect and if so how is it possible I'm running EFB in a networked setup without any of the SimConnect config files?