Quote Originally Posted by Red Harvest
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.


Quote Originally Posted by Red Harvest
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.