New Memory Leak Thread for 1.5

[red comyn]

To be fair, they said that the memory leak was fixed in the "campaign map." .

No deffinalty still there in campaign map, as previously stated just takes longer. Accidently left the game running when I went to work for about 7 hours. Took ages to get it to do anything when I came back, very scientifically it took exactly they time to swear at it a bit...smoke a ciggie....swear some more.... go make a coffee.... smoke two more fags and then the load/save/exit screen came up. Although I doubt anyone will play for this long and i hadnt noticed any problems for the two hours I was playing before I left the pc, where as before the patch the slow down was noticable in this time frame. Note this is with BI installed but playing ROME

[KSEG]

How can someone play a game continuously for 4 hours?
I rarely play more than a haour conitinuously.

[Kaldhore]

How can someone play a game continuously for 4 hours?
I rarely play more than a haour conitinuously.

4 Hours is actually quite small, It can be up to 12 hours on days off (with breaks in between)

[Atilius]

Accidently left the game running when I went to work for about 7 hours. Took ages to get it to do anything when I came back

I don't think you're describing a memory leak here. The game won't leak memory if it's not doing anything. I'm an expert memory leaker so I know something about this. Perhaps what you're seeing is the OS trying to reclaim memory written to disk for an inactive process.

[red comyn]

I don't think you're describing a memory leak here. The game won't leak memory if it's not doing anything. I'm an expert memory leaker so I know something about this. Perhaps what you're seeing is the OS trying to reclaim memory written to disk for an inactive process.

More than possibly,not an expert on these things, much like the contestants on catch phrase I "say what I see" but ill take your word for it.... although when i brought up the task manager to exit the game, the memory usage was HUGE and had the little insufficiant virtual memory warning up. Which it did after no time before the patch, would trying to recalim memory usage do this too?

[fallen851]

I'm an expert memory leaker.

Can I see your qualifications?

[Puzz3D]

I have WinXP + SP2 and 512 MB RAM. Normally 300 MB of that RAM is free and my pagefile is 350 MB in size. When I start RTW v1.5 and reload my campaign, the game uses 250 MB of the available RAM and adds 300 MB to the page file. I ran the game for 48 hours without exiting; playing on and off within that period. While the RAM usage stayed around 250 MB for the 48 hour period, the pagefile usage gradually increased from the inital 300 MB to 600 MB. At this point I was experiencing significant slowdowns as WinXP juggled parts of the program in and out of the pagefile depending on what I was doing in the game. If I had 1000 MB of RAM, I probably wouldn't have experienced any slowdowns.

[Red Harvest]

I have WinXP + SP2 and 512 MB RAM. Normally 300 MB of that RAM is free and my pagefile is 350 MB in size. When I start RTW v1.5 and reload my campaign, the game uses 250 MB of the available RAM and adds 300 MB to the page file. I ran the game for 48 hours without exiting; playing on and off within that period. While the RAM usage stayed around 250 MB for the 48 hour period, the pagefile usage gradually increased from the inital 300 MB to 600 MB. At this point I was experiencing significant slowdowns as WinXP juggled parts of the program in and out of the pagefile depending on what I was doing in the game. If I had 1000 MB of RAM, I probably wouldn't have experienced any slowdowns.

Puzz3D,

I left task manager running while playing for a few hours. It is using more and more pagefile as time passes (at least as new battles load.) Eventually it hits the limit and things lag. Interestingly...Windows says the limit is 1536 with 768 initial, but the game is maxing at 768 and I think this is where the lag begins. Either XP is actively fighting to get back to 768 (countering the leak) or the app is not requesting or getting more space. These are the defaults and "recommended" by XP itself for my level of RAM. I do not recall having set any of these even though the "custom" button is checked...so I'm trying to figure out why it would be that way. I've not tried to tweak XP the way I used to tweak 98. Guess it is time to start.

Level of detail, shadows, and the number/size of battles (particularly sieges) will likely greatly impact the total memory being used and the page file growth. I max everything, and that runs well for a few hours.

[Puzz3D]

I left task manager running while playing for a few hours. It is using more and more pagefile as time passes (at least as new battles load.) Eventually it hits the limit and things lag. Interestingly...Windows says the limit is 1536 with 768 initial, but the game is maxing at 768 and I think this is where the lag begins. Either XP is actively fighting to get back to 768 (countering the leak) or the app is not requesting or getting more space. These are the defaults and "recommended" by XP itself for my level of RAM. I do not recall having set any of these even though the "custom" button is checked...so I'm trying to figure out why it would be that way.

I let WinXP manage the size of the pagefile, so the limit may be the available disk space which on my system was 10 GB at the time. There is something I observed that I didn't get into in my previous post.

I had RTW minimized for the last 12 hours of the 48 hour period it was running. During that time, WinXP eventually swapped all but 1 MB of RTW out of RAM into the pagefile leaving 300 MB of RAM free. My pagefile was 950 MB. Since 300 MB of that belongs to things other than RTW, the game was using 650 MB. That's about the same amount of total memory (RAM + virtual memory) that RTW uses when I first start it. Now an interesting thing happened when I reactivated RTW and started playing the campaign. WinXP gave 250 MB of the available RAM to RTW, but my pagefile was still using 950 MB. I then fought a battle, and RTW RAM usage increased to 300 MB, and the pagefile was still at 950 MB. During the battle, when I would move the camera or give commands I was getting long pauses as the game had to retrieve data from the pagefile. After the battle, I got long pauses when I hit end turn as the pagefile was again accessed. So, despite the fact that RTW was now using about the same amount of RAM as it does when I first start it, WinXP had to go back to the pagefile quite often for stuff whenever I did something in the game. That suggests that WinXP is shadowing what's in RAM in the pagefile, and that what's in RAM is being inefficiently allocated to data that isn't needed while data that is needed is only in the pagefile. The shadowing might be part of WinXP's memory management. It could be that after RTW has been running for a while, WinXP is having a hard time figuring out which data should be in RAM. So, I'm not sure it's a memory leak in the sense that RTW's memory use keeps increasing, but there is something going on which affects systems that only have 512 MB of RAM while systems with 1 GB seem relatively immune possibly because more of the game resides in RAM.

Level of detail, shadows, and the number/size of battles (particularly sieges) will likely greatly impact the total memory being used and the page file growth. I max everything, and that runs well for a few hours.

This is probably why I don't see a slowdown for 6 hours or more because I don't have everything maxed. I play with no grass, no shadows and medium detail.

[Paul Peru]

I just played a few turns.
Not 1.5, though, BI 1.6, unmodded Saxon campaign.
Memory footprints of the RTW:BI exe were as follows:
pre-load, main menu 132
first turn after load 239
after battle 256
next turn 270
next turn 277
new battle 348
turn 359
turn 363
battle 371
turn 374
quick save/load 365
new quick save/load 369
quit campaign to main menu 280
continue vampaign 368
quit campaign to main menu 280!!
exit, go to main menu, 131
load 241

So in those few turns there has been a leak of 150 MB, which I can't get back without exiting the program.

edit: a slightly longer session today: up to 450, 350 retained after quitting to main menu.

[Puzz3D]

I wonder how much RAM this game really needs to avoid disk thrashing. The 256 MB minimum requirement on the box is misleading because the game actually needs a lot more than that to function, and a 256 MB RAM system will only have about 128 MB of RAM free.

[Atilius]

Can I see your qualifications?

Well, I can't find my Memory Leakers Anonymous membership card so here's some typical AtiliusCode:


void SayHelloToFallen( void )
{
int len = 16;

// Allocate memory for the text message:
//
char* message = new char[ len ];

message = "Hi fallen851\n";

cout << message << endl;

// Oops, the variable "message" is about to go out of scope and
// I haven't deleted the memory it points to - this memory will be
// lost until the program terminates

return;
}

int main( void )
{
SayHelloToFallen();
return 0;
}