its probably due to memory consumption and just overload of the game.
Stability is a major problem and from what I’m aware of, its a major thing to be worked on next update.
Read around the forum, you’ll find this is a common problem when you reach that number of citizens. It’s best to stay at about 13 until they fix the resources.
Just a quick update:
It seems that the reason for this is building things.
For some odd reason the lua just goes crazy when building stuff. Try and put your hearthlings to Town Defence mode and it should stop, and come back as soon as they start building again.
Here’s another thread about this:
So devs; please try and focus on this for the next update, it really makes the game unplayable while it happens.
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Same issue with x64 2395. very annoying
gtx 970
16gb ram
windows 10 insider preview quick release cycle
i7-3770k intel proc
help !
I have noticed that the game loop is freezing every half second or so; it almost looks like garbage collection spike.
The people all freeze in place and the cloud shadows stop moving then everything jumps just a little and continues on.
I had saved the game yesterday and reloaded today
The defense mode thing didn’t fix my hitching 
Windows 8.1 Enterprise 64bit
i7-2600 3.40ghz
16gb ram
GeForce GTX 750 TL/PCIe/SSE2 (4.5.0 NVIDIA 347.88)
The hitching happens for me too after a while. Have 12 people now. I could provide the savegame if that helps.
My system specs are:
OS: Win 8.1 Enterprise (64bit)
CPU: Intel I7-4770K @ 3.5GHz
RAM: 16GB
GPU: GeForce GTX 770 (4GB) (Driver: 347.88)
Just a quick reply here, I have been getting hitching too and I seem to have found a temporary solution to stop it.
I have install a game boosting program (ei: razer cortex) to see if it was my PC that was affecting it. So far, it is working, and I will be updating today to see how long I was able to run the game without any hitching.
EDIT: Managed to get about 2-3 hours of gameplay before it started to hitch at all.