Is this intentional? On top of the massive RAM requirements of the main executable and all the coherent UIs, this server.exe eats up another GB? It now takes about 20 minutes to fully load a medium sized system AFTER starting the game, meaning the game has long since started by the time I can move. Is 8 GB no longer enough? The new content really shouldn't have inflated the requirements that much.
Pre-expansion I would always finish loading in time to select a starting spot, so a couple of minutes. Now it takes at least 15 minutes to complete loading AFTER the game has auto-started. The insane loading times of course come from the computer using the page file because it runs out of RAM. But the PA.exe process doesn't seem to use that much more than before - the culprit is server.exe, which I'm pretty sure used very little memory before.
1GB for the server sounds pretty slim. If you play with 40 players it can eat 30GB after a while. With normal player counts its not that bad, but 1GB sounds totally normal. What's crazy is your load time. 15 MINUTES? wtf. Yep something is certainly wrong there. What system are you playing on?
This was a skirmish game against a single AI, and the server.exe process was at 1 GB before the game even started. Pretty sure that's not normal. Even more baffling, I just tried the same map in Custom Game (multiplayer), again with only myself and a single AI... and now the game loaded quickly, and there's no server.exe process hogging memory. So... I guess the memory leak is only for AI Skirmish?
if you play multiplayer it uses a server provided by uber somewhere in the internet. If you play local then it may use your own computer. Offline play. People screamed for that Are you playing a specific map? I am pretty sure 1GB of memory usage can be normal, depending on the size of the map.
That might explain it. And don't misunderstand, the game uses a lot more than 1 GB, currently at 4.5 GB in fact, but the problem is the extra 1 GB on top of that.