Game client appears to be using more memory than before

plasticbat

It appears Game client program is using much more memory than before. I just did a fresh login and stay in the character selection screen. The memory consumption in my Win10 is 1.2GB. It was way lower than before. I get into one character and the initial Home screen is still there. The memory consumption raised to 1.67GB. It was way less than that before. If I do anything such as switching to another character, the memory consumption raise to 2GB and then come down to 1.8GB.

My system can afford that kind of consumption. However, a less power PC could have problem handling that and that could cause other type of issue if memory swapping happens. I expect a system with 4GB of RAM would have hard time to run it.

greywynd

On character select I get the spinning disc icon until the mouse moves. Then whichever character is lit up renders.

When I close the game out I have a wait several minutes before the game releases the memory that it has used.

sandukutupu

At login GameClient.exe is showing 37% CPU usage, 1.1 GB RAM and 3.5 Virtual Memory
After login the client is showing 26% CPU usage, 1.3 GB RAM and 3.7 VRAM.
During active playing the CPU usage jumps to 72%, the more time the RAM increases with the more places I visit.

My husband, Brian said, this is likely due to "memory leak" within the client, memory which is no longer needed is not released. It is not the fault of the PC, their program needs repairs.

I hope it helps.

plasticbat

My current speculation is the garbage collection scheduler may be changed. I let Gameclient to stay in the character selection and idle for a long while. I watched a TV show. Its memory consumption dropped all the way to 91MB.

Then, I got into one character and memory consumption raised to 791MB.
This character is in Citadel. Switch to another character who is in PE. Memory went to 970MB.
Switch to the 3rd character who is also in PE. Memory went to 997MB.
Switch to the 4th who is in Citadel. Memory went up and down and stabilized in 985MB.
...
after 16 characters and some are in Moonstone Mask (I was doing invocation one by one) and back to character switch screen, It is a bit more than 1GB at the moment. I expect the memory would be freed later like before.

From the first post I made here to now, I did not terminate Gameclient process. It is the same process since. Memory consumption did drop from 1.8GB to 91MB.

Based on this particular scenario, I cannot say it has memory leak. I suspect it is just the garbage collection scheduler different and it does not free the memory right the way which is not necessary a bad thing.

So, this probably is not an issue. Or, I can't say there is an issue based on what I found so far.

micky1p00

"Native" C / C++ do not have garbage collection, and in general* games tend to not be written in garbage collected (managed) languages due to performance requirements. IIRC at least the old code was not GCed. (Ofc it could have been changed)

*I mean the regular A+ stuff on desktop and console, stuff where you measure fps and need graphic cards, ofc, there games in every language and platform and many are GC, like Javascript for example.

It could be just more aggressive caching to increase performance since it's extremely unlikely to meet 4gb systems anymore, and the 32bit client was abandoned long ago.
When today's browsers eat memory like light snacks and you are expected to run other stuff in parallel to them, 2gb for a game is really not that much. Other games take easily twice and three times more (6gb+)

plasticbat

micky1p00 said:

"Native" C / C++ do not have garbage collection, and in general* games tend to not be written in garbage collected (managed) languages due to performance requirements. IIRC at least the old code was not GCed. (Ofc it could have been changed)

*I mean the regular A+ stuff on desktop and console, stuff where you measure fps and need graphic cards, ofc, there games in every language and platform and many are GC, like Javascript for example.

It could be just more aggressive caching to increase performance since it's extremely unlikely to meet 4gb systems anymore, and the 32bit client was abandoned long ago.
When today's browsers eat memory like light snacks and you are expected to run other stuff in parallel to them, 2gb for a game is really not that much. Other games take easily twice and three times more (6gb+)

My observation is the Gameclient slowly releasing memory when I put the game to 'switch character' screen. Slowly means it free the memory to system bit by bit in (say) every 10 minutes and went all the way from 1.8GB to ~100MB after an hour or two. When I said garbage collection, it does not have to be the language dependent garbage collection. It can be internal clean up to find something to free to system periodically or a customized memory management feature. I wrote such thing in C for latter.

nitocris83

Sharing thread with the resident wizards (aka programmers/engineers)