Massive Ram Usage

Discussion in 'Support!' started by jpmassey, December 16, 2014.

  1. jpmassey

    jpmassey New Member

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    Every multiplayer game I am play with more than 2 planets at about 15 minutes in, memory usage starts climbing steady till it maxes my computer. I watch the resource manager, and it is flat, and then ramps linearly over about 5 minutes to max. I've got a new alienware I7 with 16 GB. When the memory maxes, the game crashes, and I have to hard restart the computer.
    My buddy plays in the same game with a Mac, and his gameplay is smooth and memory use is only a few GB.

    thread in the steam forums about this: http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/discussions/2/626329186979497804/
    Ram usage image:
    [​IMG]

    Happened right after I started building orbitals at about 20 minutes. I had just finished killing two AI commanders in a big battle. (That means the # of units was actually down at that point)

    3 planets, 4 AI commanders.
    Last edited by a moderator: December 16, 2014
  2. SXX

    SXX Post Master General

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    Make sure your page file / virtual memory is enabled and large enough (12GB or more is good choice).
  3. jpmassey

    jpmassey New Member

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    Are you saying that 14 GB of available ram is not suffient, and I need 26 total? Lol

    I took a screenshot of the system resources when the memory leak starts, but can't even post a link here. Its on the steam forum if you want to look at it.
  4. radongog

    radongog Well-Known Member

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    You don´t need it with 16 GiBs! Of course it doesn´t hurt, but I tried it out and the difference wasn´t noticeable for me!
  5. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    Yep with 16GB I am often running 2 instances of PA and I only have 2GB page file. No issues for me.
    The OP seems to describe a memory leak, I've seen the screenshot of his memory usage. It's a linear growing steep upwards until it dies.
    Are you using the same planet for every game?
  6. SXX

    SXX Post Master General

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    Unfortunately your OS, drivers and software running in background do use memory too and OS also free use memory for filesystem cache which take some time to unload on demand. Windows designed to work with page file enabled and really many players who disabled it for some reasons had problems because of it.

    So reason of why your friend with Mac don't have such problems might be in fact he does have enough virtual memory.
  7. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    I've put in the image into the OP.
    I seriously doubt that has much to do with virtual memory size.
    Also I can confirm that running 2 instances of PA with medium planets, and multiple background applications (I tend to use youtube in chrome as my music player for example, as well as a list of other things that tend to eat ram) at least can work totally fine with a small 2GB page file and 16GB of ram. Might not work for everyone, but it does for me.

    EDIT:
    Looking at that line in the image it does start out rather high already. Was PA running already there? How much memory does PA itself eat?
    Last edited: December 16, 2014
  8. SXX

    SXX Post Master General

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    It's just one of things that worth to check. Sometimes RAM might be limited by Windows edition (not OP problem likely) or being reserved by some bad driver (happen often, might eat any amount of RAM).

    Though it's should be visible in DxDiag.txt
    cola_colin likes this.
  9. jpmassey

    jpmassey New Member

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    Playing with 3 planets took about 5 GB of RAM for the first 15 minutes (perfectly stead), until it started climbing. Windows takes about 2.2 GB. No other programs were running. This screenshot could be used in a computer science class as a stereotypical memory leak. Something is being allocated and not released.

    My buddies mac only uses 2-4 GB for the game depending on the system.
  10. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    What planets exactly? Can you export them?
  11. jpmassey

    jpmassey New Member

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    I don't have the computer available at the moment. It was default 3 planet system where you only start on 2. But, this has happened several times on different systems.
  12. galaxyisos

    galaxyisos Member

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    i can confirm( tested) that if you play on HUGE planets(1900+ radius size), without 10gb+ virtual memory it crashes.my desktop system has 8gb ram.
    it depends on planet size.
  13. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    Well yeah, but anything beyound 1300 is only possible with modding. Ofc if you go crazy with a modded system it gets ... funny ^^
  14. jpmassey

    jpmassey New Member

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    I played another game using 24 GB of minimum page file on the main HD. Same exact thing happened. About 10 minutes it, linear increase in RAM. When physical RAM maxes, game crashes. After game crashed, 13 GB are now available.

    Sorry....this just isn't worth my time to mess with. Fun game, but its obvious barely ready for beta testing.
  15. cola_colin

    cola_colin Moderator Alumni

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    What you're experiencing is pretty rare actually
  16. cdrkf

    cdrkf Post Master General

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    I've not run into anything like this. I play on 2 machines without any problems. Just to check do you use (or have ever
    used) any mods? How is game installed, steam or uber launcher?
  17. SXX

    SXX Post Master General

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    If you want to investigate this and do have time for that please add me on Steam.
    There is some tricks we can try to check if it's memory leakage, some game bug of conflict with 3rd party software.
    cdrkf likes this.

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