RAM usage increasing continually with Overcast

[Kuky]

I am going to start new thread on this to separate from other issues as I think this could be a bug but it needs confirmation first, so anyway, here's what happens:

 

I've noticed by RAM usage rising continually and quite rapidly (sometimes as fast as about 10MB every 10-15sec) in certain occasions/missions, and I think I've narrowed it to Overcast weather in mission causing it, at least for me.

 

I've attached 2 mission files, both have single player MiG-29A on parking bay with engines off and nothing else in the mission and only difference is second mission is set to Could density of 10 (aka Overcast) and a DirectX diagnostics (if it helps)

 

When I run mission with no Overcast my RAM usage is stable at approx 1.67GB

When I run mission with Overcast my RAM usage is increasing gradually and only after some 2min it reaches 1.78GB-1.80GB

 

 

Can I get someone to test and see if they can replicate this, use Windows Task Manager and monitor Performance.. I am very eager to see if anyone else gets the same thing :noexpression:

 

EDIT:

 

My system specs:

- Windows 7 64bit with all Windows updates

- ASUS P5Q-E motherboard

- Intel E8500 CPU o/c to 3.8GHz

- Corsair 4GB DDR2 RAM (2 sticks of 2GB)

- ATI HD4890 1GB of RAM main video card driving 24" and 8" touchscreen

- ATI HD4670 1GB of RAM secondary video card driving two 8"

- Creative X-Fi PCI sound card

 

Peripherals:

- TM HOTAS Cougar

- TM Cougar MFD pack

- Leo Bonard's USB controller (for switches)

- TrackIR 5

 

Everything is on latest driver, motherboard BIOS is latest also. System is generally very stable and never locks up, crashes or similar.

 

System itself uses about 1GB of RAM, when I load FC2 it uses about 2GB on average... I do have mods installed:

 

- F-15C 3D model (by Gys/Valery)

- Su-27 3D model (by 3GO)

- A-10A 3D model (by SIMMOD)

- Weapons 3D models (by Walmis)

- B-8 and UB-13 rocket pods model (by Bezcl)

- MiG-29 Fueltank 3D model (hm forgot by whom)

- HD cockpits mod (by Ricardo)

- F-15C cockpit mod (by DirctorK)

- I also converted all sound files in sound folder that were WMV to OGG format... and I think that's about it.

 

EDIT: I tried fresh install of FC2 and patched to 1.2.1 with absolutely no files modified at all and I have same issue!

 

I do run everything on high settings, and use 4xAA, 8xAF high quality graphics settings which is why I think my RAM usage starts much higher then lot of others, and also Windows 7 uses lot of RAM to begin with, but this is not an issue as I have enough RAM to run it, only problem is, it keeps rising... eventually it will limit out and this is not good

Edited May 26, 2010 by Kuky

[christopher m]

Kuky,

 

I tested your missions and report the following:

 

No overcast I flew around for about 10 minutes and only got to 938mb ram usage

 

Overcast mission I flew around about 15 minutes and got up to 952mb ram usage

 

it was going up but slowly 1mb at a time

 

 

I have only few mods, 6DoF mod, FC2 cloud and shadow mod, FC2 stock sound compression mod

 

I have not modded the graphics.cfg (waiting on that)

 

I have turned off the force feedback and the track IR

 

I have increased my page file to 8192-16384mb

 

I am running Win XP sp3

 

I have intel dualcore @ 3gighz and four gig memory @ 880mghz

 

XP SP3 only recognizes 3.2gigbytes of the memory

 

I have GTS 250 vid card with 1 gig memory

 

Old Asus striker extreme MB

 

I surprised myself with this result but I think with some other complications in the mission the memory usage would go up faster

 

Regards,

Edited May 24, 2010 by christopher m

[nomdeplume]

Not sure what flying around would prove with respect to whether overcast is a memory leak or not.

 

Non-overcast mission, started up and looked around the cockpit and external view to load any objects in the vicinity, memory stabilised at 650 MB "working set" (522 private working set). Left it in the default cockpit view with 10x time compression for 1hr35m game time. No real change in the memory usage.

 

Overcast mission, same steps. Left it running in the cockpit view for 3hr13m game time (again at 10x compression). Memory still the same as when I left it, stable at 670 MB working set, 550 MB private working set.

 

No mods, didn't go flying or even start the engines - just let it sit there.

[Kuky]

Thanks for testing guys... I'll just add more... just flew in 3Sqn server for just over 2 hours in Capturing Maykop mission... my RAM was stable at 2.16GB-2.19GB and did not increase... this map has nice weather with clouds.

Edited May 24, 2010 by Kuky

[Boberro]

In my case LO's RAM usage is continously growing up. Especially when there are many people... It is so bad LO doesn't have any flushing memory mechanism and due that FPS are lower and lower and lower and lower and lower and you have to rejoin. I heard it is not only on old PCs, but also on newer, so...

[Kuky]

I just tried exact same thing with BS and I get same result... I make new mission, single Ka-50 on parking area... no clouds and cloud density up to 8... RAM usage is stable... when I set cloud density to overcast (10) RAM increases by about 10MB about every 8sec.. what gives?

[Kuky]

I just did a fresh install of FC2 to eliminate possibility of mods causing this issue... and again on fresh install of FC2 and also when patched to 1.2.1 when overcast is on my RAM usage continually keeps increasing.. this has to be overcast having memory leakage somehow

[104th_Crunch]

Kuky, did you customize your virtual memory page file size at all? Perhaps leave it default?

[Kuky]

it's set to custom 4GB min/max, don't think that is it because without overcast RAM is stable, if it were because of Pagefile it would happen with or without overcast

 

EDIT: just for the sake of trying I changed Pagefile to recommended size 6142MB min/max and same thing

Edited May 27, 2010 by Kuky

[bumfire]

Just to add to this, Windows 7 has a memory leak bug and there is a hotfix available for it which may or may not help.

 

Certain programs use the WFP call out driver in Vista/7/server 2008 and have problems with it resulting in huge memory leaks and an eventual "Out of Resources" error aka run out of ram error.

 

There is a hotfix for it which has cured the problem for me, although I cant say I noticed the memory leak in lockon, probably because I have only just started to use it in windows 7 64bit and the fix already applied to my machine months ago.

 

The fix can be found here

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979223/en-us

 

and this is a direct link to the hotfix

 

http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=979223&kbln=en-us

 

As I said above, the hotfix cured the memory leak I was having with win7 ultimate 64.

 

Kuky, your symptoms do resemble mine when sabnzbd+ was having the same problem, every few seconds the memory would keep rising and rising until either the app was stopped or it eventually ran out of memory and the app crashed or the OS crashed.

Edited May 27, 2010 by bumfire

[Kuky]

Thanks very much for that, what you describe sabnzbd+ was having is exactly the same issue I seem to have... gonna try this hotfix and report if it helps

[Kuky]

ah bummer... installed the hotfix... and it's still happening... no overcast and RAM is stable... with overcast and RAM keeps increasing :(

[bumfire]

Sorry to hear that the hotfix didnt work, I used it because of sabnzdb, as soon as it started it would within about 10 minutes or more it would eat up the majority of my 4 gig of ram, rising every 2-3 seconds by a few MB, I eventually found the hotfix and it worked a treat.

 

Do you disable your antivirus whilst playing ? as maybe the the realtime protection is scanning every file that lockon is opening and using thus increasing the memory ?

[Kuky]

I have Trendmicro Internet Security installed which I need to have installed as I work from home 2 days/week and company requires me to have it installed but I always disable it while I play. Even if it would be causing it I don't see why it would do it only when overcast is on?

[Kuky]

Looking again in Windows Task Manager, this time Processes tab, I see simulator.exe *32 utilising 67-75% of the CPU (dual core) and Memory usage keeps increasing, all other processes are mostly not utilising the CPU (if they do it's 1-2% every few sec, like System process) and their Memory does not keeping increasing.

Edited May 27, 2010 by Kuky

[3Sqn_TomAce]

I'll check mine tonight Kuky monster see if I can rep. your issue also on win764.

[Breakshot]

Kuky, try setting up MaxFPS in graphics.cfg to 32 or 64 frames (I personally run it locked at 32), if you havent already...

 

This should reduce the CPU load significantly, and might solve the memory issues too...

[EtherealN]

Also does allow for any chokes to get "hidden" - your brain will perceive things as smoother if they get a steady 30FPS to look at instead of something that jumps between 30 and 60.

[Kuky]

Frame-rate is good all round, I have no complaint there, just that for some reason any mission that has overcast my RAM usage keeps going up even if there's nothing happening in the mission... eventually it will run RAM out of space and I get stutters (as it tries to handle loading from HDD probably etc) and even crash. There has to be memory leak

 

Breakshot, I tried setting the MaxFPS and it doesn't help, RAM usage is still increasing

[EtherealN]

I'll have a look-through with some memory monitors and your miz-files in a bit, Kuky. Feel free to add me on MSN in case I need some extra feedback.

[Kuky]

bah I don't use MSN :) Give it a crack, I wonder what you're gonna get

[EtherealN]

I'll let you know when I've dug through it. I've got some stuff keeping me busy for a couple hours but after that I'll give this a spin.

[Kuky]

no worries, thanks for helping out... I'll be off to bed soon, and will read your post tomorrow

[asparagin]

Ok so I loaded also the two mission files you attached. I don't seem to have troubles.

I have win7 X86. Win 7 has this "resource monitor" (might be called something else in english) and I looked at the RAM simulator.exe is consuming.

 

without Overcast: 360,000 kB

with Overcast: 345,000 kB

 

and both values were constant. If you look in task manager you see 280,9K for no overclouds and 266,67K for with overclouds (I don't know why, I thought K is kB..)

[TheMoose]

I did a test with only Overcast since thats the one that seems causing more issues.

 

I'm on Windows 64Bit Ult. Memory is system managed (I dont recommend playing with VM setting on win 7). Default services. OS is freshly (last weekend) installed.

For me it was pretty stable...

My system specs are in my sig.

 

Here are my results after 15 min of flight:

 

 

 

My settings:

 

 

I love how windows seven manages his memory. I can't stress enough to let the services for memory management at default settings. Unlike Xp where tweaking memory and VM is almost necessary, but under 7. Not required.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Edit: let me know if you want me to redo the test at different settings. (without changing my windows memory management of course :smilewink: )

 

 

Regards,

Edited May 27, 2010 by TheMoose