Fix The Memory Leak!

[Mouzafphaerre]

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I played like ten hours yesterday and quit before engaging in a battle realizing the leak had gone mad. Really, it was 205,som,eth,ing in Task Manager.
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[Red Harvest]

Did a check of task manager tonight:

Shutting down the game took ~45 seconds (30 seconds once the exit screen actually came up.)

Took me awhile to get into task manager, so I don't know what the memory usage was before...but by the time I got in it was *down* to 277 MB...so it was well over 300 MB when things got really choppy in the game. Took 4 minutes solid of it hitting the disk before it cleared.

This one was moderate, I've had worse.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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So have I. I was careless not to save and exit in time and had to forcefully kill the game in a battle scene. Thankfully the autosave file didn't get corrupt. (Actually I only had one corrupt savefile in 1.3/1.4, which is a major improvement from MTW 2.01.)
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[DarKorg]

I don't have any problem
I still bame the users side

[Red Harvest]

I don't have any problem
I still bame the users side

Considering it didn't happen until 1.3, it isn't the users side.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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I've noticed in my latest two sessions that the leak began to hit earlier than it would.
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[Michael the Brave]

Does the memory leak affect BI aswell or only RTW 1.3 ?

[professorspatula]

Both. If anything it's worse in BI, but then I've played BI much more than RTW 1.3 so it's really probably the same.

[Butcher]

Sounds great. Glad I haven't got BI yet, or reinstalled RTW after getting a new Hard drive.
I'll wait for a patch..

[Razor1952]

I'm using 512 Ram and 1.3 vanilla RTW, and certainly have the same problem.

I notice that the temporary process someting like ~005temp can be seen in task manager, and when the "leak" is bad then you can get extra temporary processes started. These are associated with RTW because stopping them stops RTW!.

I must admit I've taken to a quick crash out of RTW using task manger stopping the temporary processes (or rtw.exe) .

And don't anyone bother telling me that stopping processes like that is bad for your computer. As long as you don't stop critical processes you are not going to get into trouble.

[SadOldGoth]

All,
I don't really understand what the big problem is. Yes, there is a memory leak, which is not great.
In XP, start the Task manager, click the Performance tab.
Start RTW, play for a while, I only see the problem after playing 2-3 hours.
Exit RTW, look at the Task manager. You'll see the memory line decreasing, took no longer than 1-2 minutes so far, could be more if more memory is taken up due to the hard drive needing to clear out the virtual memory. At some point all virtual memory is cleared.

Start RTW again, enjoy for the next couple of hours.

If you have been playing for hours on end, take a break anyway. If you actually work with PCs it's recommended to take at least a 5 minute break every hour so your eyes can relax a bit...

SadOldGoth

[Kraxis]

Considering it didn't happen until 1.3, it isn't the users side.

Ha! You installed the patch... User side problem.

[Red Harvest]

All,
I don't really understand what the big problem is. Yes, there is a memory leak, which is not great.
In XP, start the Task manager, click the Performance tab.
Start RTW, play for a while, I only see the problem after playing 2-3 hours.
Exit RTW, look at the Task manager. You'll see the memory line decreasing, took no longer than 1-2 minutes so far, could be more if more memory is taken up due to the hard drive needing to clear out the virtual memory. At some point all virtual memory is cleared.

Start RTW again, enjoy for the next couple of hours.

If you have been playing for hours on end, take a break anyway. If you actually work with PCs it's recommended to take at least a 5 minute break every hour so your eyes can relax a bit...

SadOldGoth

Considering that it starts slowing down battles fairly early on...and later you get stuck playing a big battle with fairly massive lag, it is a problem. Battles like that are seriously unfun, and they take a lot of time--doubling the pain. I already have plenty of interruptions as it is. I don't need another artificial one, thank you.

Shutdown and start up time to clear is 4-5 minutes when this gets to be a problem. I've checked this multiple times. It is using about 300 MB's (and much of this appears to be on disk) by the time I give up. Doesn't happen much early in a campaign, but gets really bad later. The shut down sequence is a pain, since there are big delays between each action because of the memory leak (Reminds me of install routines, and that is not a good thing.) So I end up babysitting it if I'm going to resume playing. The duration of the onset of serious lag to restart is typically about half an hour. So as a user I get about one half hour of irritation, for every 2-3 hours of play. Gee, thanks.

Somehow I doubt CA really wants to tell customers, "You shouldn't play our game for more than an hour or two. We recommend you go do something else." Once I've shutdown there is a very good chance that I'll be unable to come back.

[Puzz3D]

Once I've shutdown there is a very good chance that I'll be unable to come back.

You can avoid the wait by killing the RomeTW.exe process in task manager. However, since you have to save and reload the game on every turn anyway to avoid the naval invasion problem, you could restart the game after every turn. CA should really allow people to stop and smell the flowers.

[Just A Girl]

Indeed. I love flowers.

[Puzz3D]

Indeed. I love flowers.

Tulips are my favorite.

I believe the memory leak is grounds for getting a refund because it causes the game to eventually stop working. If CA doesn't fix this, I will ask for a refund.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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Yesterday I got a record of 288M! Today it was moderate at 250M.

Please don't leave this unattended.

Btw, it seems certain that the problem is related to the stratmap. No leak happened after a quite long session of custom battles.
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[Heinrich VI]

P4 1,7
512MB DDR266

ive stopped playing BI because of this "§$%& memory leak after i had to kill the rtw task in disgust while waiting for the game to load 2-fullstacks + huge city (rome) battle.

i have yet to try vanilla 1.3 since im mostly playing mods on 1.2 now but id like to know if it is affected too.

@CA: FIX IT!

[Krauser]

I don't know about BI but vanilla RTW 1.3 plays fine. I've got 640MB RAM, just a little more than 512MB that everyone says is the borderline for the leak. That seems to be true.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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1.3 is as doomed as 1.4 (BI).
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[Red Harvest]

I don't know about BI but vanilla RTW 1.3 plays fine. I've got 640MB RAM, just a little more than 512MB that everyone says is the borderline for the leak. That seems to be true.

Vanilla RTW 1.3 has the problem.

[Kaldhore]

Ive just played 7 hours straight on RTW 1.3, Sound crashed the game, but I think theres a sound problem anyway on my pc....

Only thing was the game took a long time to get out of memory once I shut it down. Other than my battles were fine - no slowdown etc

Maybe its a graphic specific thats causing the leak - and some people arent using that specific?

[Red Harvest]

It is way too generalized for that. Most importantly, it didn't happen in previous releases. Why is Rome sucking up extra resources and not releasing them when sitting idle? I don't know, but it clearly is doing so, and to release them takes quite awhile.

[Duke John]

I read somewhere that the lag was reduced/gone when Shadows were set to off. From what I see ingame CA has introduced a new shadowsystem; objects now cast "shadows" on other objects. When an unit is partially under a tree some soldiers are darker than the ones standing in the light. Perhaps CA messed up part of the the shadow code.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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The problem is somewhere in the strategic map code, not in the battles. As I said earlier, hours of custom battles run without any leak, but anything more than approximately two hours on strategic levels results in the bug.
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[Just A Girl]

Tulips are my favorite.

I love roses.

[Kekvit Irae]

I'd like to take this time to remind you all that discussion of cd cracks and various other "grey areas" of the law is not allowed here, so please get back on topic and enjoy the flowers.

[Just A Girl]

I'd like to take this time to remind you all that discussion of cd cracks and various other "grey areas" of the law is not allowed here, so please get back on topic and enjoy the flowers.

I will be shure to bear that in mind in the future,
I will confine such disscussions to PM if its acceptable...?

[Kekvit Irae]

Private Messages are perfectly fine, so long as it's just a discussion (IE: no offering cracks or whatever over PM).

[Red Harvest]

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The problem is somewhere in the strategic map code, not in the battles. As I said earlier, hours of custom battles run without any leak, but anything more than approximately two hours on strategic levels results in the bug.
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I've had it happen on custom battles too during unit testing. Can't remember the specifics, but I noted it because I had *only* done custom battles during the session.