investigating All 32GB memory is used in Multiplayer

[KoN]

6 hours ago, Luse said:

Another one for the encyclopedia memory add. Hitting memory limit with 32GB RAM & 32GB Pagefile, granted I am using VR & Higher res textures. 

If you lower textures to medium and ground texture too low your find that will free up RAM and Vram . 

[RuskyV]

7 hours ago, KoN said:

If you lower textures to medium and ground texture too low your find that will free up RAM and Vram . 

This will definitely help, however it’s a patch put over a problem that needs to be sorted. 

A good portion of this community have mid to high tier systems capable of running a lot of modern games, those spending a lot of time playing those other games must be a little perplexed to be then lowering settings to get a game to run.

[Mr_sukebe]

Another vote for using Terrain Textures at a setting of Low.

I saw a massive difference of RAM usage between the two options

[KoN]

Flew in VR on Rotor-heads server last night in Blackhawk . Was getting 37 fps with motion on in steam . Had a few very Bad stutters mainly coming into land . Grass on set too 200 . 

I have the MT shortcut with --force_enable_VR --force_OpenXR

Edited March 24, 2023 by KoN

[BlueSkies]

I am also getting my 32GB RAM and 8GB VRAM maxed out on MT multiplayer. Textures high, terrain textures low. I've got another 32GB on the way so we'll see how that helps.

[BlueSkies]

Got the RAM installed today and hopped on Through The Inferno Syria. With the same settings I had no stutter, solid 60fps, and it felt like I was in an SP tutorial mission with how good it was performing. Huge difference. RAM usage was about 40GB according to task manager.

[Mud]

Just flew a long mission with a buddy in MP in Syria.  All 32MB memory used and caused SteamVR and HWinfo to crash also cause the system was out of memory.

 

 

dcs.log-20230328-220509.zip

[Flappie]

Hi. Try a bigger pagefile.

1. Ensure you have sufficient free space in your drives (~50 GB).
2. Edit your pagefile settings: https://mcci.com/support/guides/how-to-change-the-windows-pagefile-size/
3. Choose these values:

• init size: 32768 (32 GB)
• max size: 32768 (32 GB)

[Agim]

I can recommend to set the page file to 1.5x DDR size. It solved all my crashes so far .

[Mud]

Thanks for the pagefile recommendations.  Mine was manualy set to 16GB maximum.
Now the 2 questions I have are

- Is there a memory leak at the moment which is being looked into?
- Does this only happen in multiplayer?

It's a long mission (+3 hours flight) in Syria with not much going on.  Flew it alone in the Tomcat with no issues, and then yesterday flying in F-16s with a friend, I ran into the issue on our way back to base.  

Best regards,

Mud

[Marco Schaap]

1 hour ago, Agim said:

I can recommend to set the page file to 1.5x DDR size. It solved all my crashes so far .

As per Microsoft recommendations:

In the Virtual Memory dialog, select the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives check box, or clear the check box and specify a paging file size that is equal to or greater than the physical memory that is available on the computer. We recommend that you either allow the system to manage the page file size or to set it at 150% of the size of the physical RAM.

Microsoft Learn

[TAW_Impalor]

A bigger page file can avoid the crashes, but flying in VR with constant stutters is no fun. I think we identified the cause: the object textures that should be purged from RAM on some regular basis.

[Flappie]

5 hours ago, Mud said:

Thanks for the pagefile recommendations.  Mine was manualy set to 16GB maximum.
Now the 2 questions I have are

- Is there a memory leak at the moment which is being looked into?
- Does this only happen in multiplayer?

It's a long mission (+3 hours flight) in Syria with not much going on.  Flew it alone in the Tomcat with no issues, and then yesterday flying in F-16s with a friend, I ran into the issue on our way back to base.  

Best regards,

Mud

MP, Syria, F-16, they all consume a lot of RAM (Apache, Hind and A-10C are also greedy, mainly because of their textures. When put together, you can expect DCS to take 50+ GB of memory.

Aircraft textures consuming a lot of RAM are reported and devs are working on it.

[Gui_Santos]

I have noticied the same problems with RAM after MT Update.

[KoN]

On 3/29/2023 at 4:02 PM, Flappie said:

MP, Syria, F-16, they all consume a lot of RAM (Apache, Hind and A-10C are also greedy, mainly because of their textures. When put together, you can expect DCS to take 50+ GB of memory.

Aircraft textures consuming a lot of RAM are reported and devs are working on it.

So is DCS addressing this issue. I don't think NASA  is using 50GB of ram to land on the moon LoL . 

[Shrike88]

absolutely absurd eating 32GB of ram just to run on high settings.  Hopefully this gets addressed soon.   Just stating that running a map with all of the objects and payware modules offered in a platform title requires you to exponentially upgrade your Ram front end just to run a map with a decent amount of activity is just silly.   Im trying to think of any other title like ARMA or MSFS stating well if you want air traffic turned on or actually want to engage in combat its going to consume all of your ram just to load the features.  So you will have to upgrade your system past 32GB of DDR3+ ram just to have these options on a medium to higher setting.  

We shall see.  Hopefully next patch

Edited April 1, 2023 by Shrike88

[Rapierarch]

I'll leave these links. Disabling precaching slows down and even halts the memory buildup 

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/xmdbpc/i_need_your_help_to_support_my_2_small_but/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

 

Edited April 1, 2023 by Rapierarch

[Lee Dove]

I have discovered that MT VR is using double the memory of ST VR and 2D and MT 2D so I am not surprised that it is crashing.  The solution is to use the ST version for VR which works very well.

[Rapierarch]

I

35 minutes ago, Lee Dove said:

I have discovered that MT VR is using double the memory of ST VR and 2D and MT 2D so I am not surprised that it is crashing.  The solution is to use the ST version for VR which works very well.

 

have seen that post. Good find. That's crazy that developers missed that obvious sign of 2x memory usage. I hope new patch fixes it. 

[TAW_Impalor]

On 4/8/2023 at 2:13 PM, Lee Dove said:

I have discovered that MT VR is using double the memory of ST VR and 2D and MT 2D so I am not surprised that it is crashing.  The solution is to use the ST version for VR which works very well.

For me there is no difference. Both MT and ST max my 32Gb on GS after 15-20 minutes. Textures High, Terrain textures - Low.

[Rapierarch]

1 hour ago, TAW_Impalor said:

For me there is no difference. Both MT and ST max my 32Gb on GS after 15-20 minutes. Textures High, Terrain textures - Low.

I  max 32GB in free flight missions too. Foothold now runs with 50GB 10 minutes after start. 

[Str][ker]

I have 64 GB of DDR5 RAM on an AMD 7950X3D system, 4090 video card and fast NVMe drives. I fly only in VR and my RAM is pretty much all used up. I also get stutters which I believe is related to page faults experienced by the DCS.exe process (where the system needs to load data from the slow Page file on disk to RAM.) I see a lot of page faults which surprised me. I do have all settings maxed out (well all of the ones used for VR flying). If 64 GB is not enough to avoid page faults then 32 GB is definitely not enough. and you will experience these major stutters. I have recorded how these show up in game on the FPS graph. I listed 6 instances of this happening. I see it a lot on multi player and occasionally on single player. I never ran into this before on my much lower end system although I did have settings turned down lower. These glitches are very noticeable in VR as it often happens while turning my head and everything freezes momentarily and then jumps to where I am now looking..

 

EDIT: I decided to try cutting back on detail settings to see if this would help and it did. I was able to fly on a very busy multiplayer server in Syria without issue. I'm going to slowly move back settings until I start to see the glitch/pauses again. It would seem (surprisingly) that a system with 64 GB of RAM and an RTX4090 video card is not enough to prevent swapping memory out to disk (page file). I wonder if 128 GB of RAM is required to fly on full settings.

 

EDIT 2: I found the culprit. Textures set to High will consume all RAM (Video and System). See my post below.

 

Edited April 19, 2023 by Str][ker

[TAW_Impalor]

On 4/1/2023 at 1:19 PM, Rapierarch said:

I'll leave these links. Disabling precaching slows down and even halts the memory buildup 

Thanks! It does seem to slow down RAM clogging. I just flew 1.5 hours on GS and got only to 28 GB. Great job!!!

Edited April 16, 2023 by TAW_Impalor

[Str][ker]

Here is what I have determined. In VR, if you enable High Textures, you will use up all available video and computer memory and it will swap to disk somewhat frequently. My system is an AMD 7950X3D, 64 GB DDR5 RAM, RTX4090 GPU, M2 NVMe storage. I get major pauses / stutters periodically when flying in VR (I only fly VR).

These are two scenarios which I have observed regarding this issue.

1. All typical VR settings Maxed (none of the full screen AA stuff) but all details, distances, etc maxed. I get stutters in single player and multi-player. It is much more noticeable and frequent in multiplayer. If I disable swap on my system (64 GB of RAM is more than enough) the stuttering gets worse and shortly afterwards I get a crash with a VRAM memory error (out of video memory trying to allocate a texture). I have seen other errors related to memory problems with DCS which resulted in the crash.

2.All typical VR settings Maxed (none of the full screen AA stuff) all details, distances, etc maxed BUT NOT Textures (I set this to Medium). I get no stutters at all. I can also run with no swap file without issue when the Textures is set to medium. There is some issue with the Textures in VR. This seems to have started with the initial release of the MT version. I used to be able to run with it set to High but can't any more without significant performance issues.

[Str][ker]

On 4/1/2023 at 7:19 AM, Rapierarch said:

I'll leave these links. Disabling precaching slows down and even halts the memory buildup 

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/xmdbpc/i_need_your_help_to_support_my_2_small_but/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

 

 

@Rapierarch These changes don't help with the current MT executable in VR when Textures are set to High. I modified the graphics.lua and it still crashed with a memory allocation issue (I have my page file disabled with 64 GB of RAM). If I leave Textures to Medium, all is well. This seems to be a new issue introduced with the MT exe and apparently affects VR quite severely. If I enable my Page File, I don't crash but I get noticeable pauses / hiccups in game play on multi-player servers. In single player I still see the hiccups but not as frequently at first but eventually they happen more often. I suspect this is caused by paging out memory to / from disk storage (NVMe m2)