Bug: Memory leak in RES

[DevCMDR]

So, spending a lot of time in a RES, I've encountered some interesting memory usage.

The attached images are over the space of seconds.
Nothing's really happening, but the framerate is seconds per frame at points. I just watched the time in the corner skip from 31s to 54s.

 

[Morbad]

What's the timeline on these images?

A memory leak is more than a spike in memory allocation.

 

[Ettanin]

Do you use a ship-launched fighter or fought with/against cmdrs/NPCs that use these? They are known to cause this issue.

 

[DevCMDR]

What's the timeline on these images?

A memory leak is more than a spike in memory allocation.

Seconds. Literally seconds.
It was 14 gigs, then down to 4 gigs, back up to 10 gigs, etc.

Do you use a ship-launched fighter or fought with/against cmdrs/NPCs that use these? They are known to cause this issue.

I'm using an NPC controlled SLF.
That's a crazy amount of ram fluctuation for something like that though.

 

[Morbad]

Seconds. Literally seconds.
It was 14 gigs, then down to 4 gigs, back up to 10 gigs, etc.

That's not a memory leak, just erratic memory usage, possibly explainable by the game evicting old assets and loading new ones

A memory leak is when an application doesn't release memory when it should.

 

[DevCMDR]

That's not a memory leak, just erratic memory usage, possibly explainable by the game evicting old assets and loading new ones

A memory leak is when an application doesn't release memory when it should.

As a programmer, I'd still class this as a memory leak. It's functionally the same; this process has all the ram. None of the other programs can get any, because Elite keeps churning it into ram butter. I'm talking ram allocation fluctuation of that magnitude every second. 1s: 14 gigs. 2s: 4gigs. 3s: 10 gigs.
If that were assignment/eviction of assets, then that's garbage collection that's so efficient that it's gone all the way around to inefficiency.

I appreciate the difference in a normal situation, but I'd argue this is worse than a straight memory leak, because the system process was REAL unhappy about that memory churning.

 

[Bravo17]

As Morbad said, not a memory leak. if it went 2gb, 4gb, 6gb, 8gb, 10gb, 12gb, 14gb and stayed there it COULD be a memory leak, it could also just be that that was the amount of memory needed for the task at hand. The system being "unhappy about that memory churning" means just that - the system was using a lot of resources to allocate the memory, which is what it is supposed to do.

With a memory leak the memory usage only goes in one direction - up. And in a game like ED its very difficult to spot since there is so much all going on at the same time with constantly changing memory requirements.

 

[d8veh]

The frame-rate decrease has been there since the beginning of the game. The longer you stay in a RES, the lower the frame-rate. After 6 hours, you can hardly fly your ship. It's nothing to do with graphics. You can turn the quality and resolution up or down. It makes no difference.

 

[DevCMDR]

The frame-rate decrease has been there since the beginning of the game. The longer you stay in a RES, the lower the frame-rate. After 6 hours, you can hardly fly your ship.

I've noticed that on several occasions, but this time, I ended up going to sleep and leaving the client. Interestingly, I've got a second client there, on another machine, which is fine.
The only difference is the amount of ram available (significantly more on the machine with the problems), and no NPC pilot on the secondary machine.
The machine with the NPC pilot is absolutely churning ram allocation right now though, which is causing the system process to grind everything to a halt.

So, I suspect that Ettanin is correct, it's the NPC pilot causing the entire issue.

 

[OomPapaMeowMeow]

Well there IS a memory leak. Just sit your ship in a RES site overnight and come back to 1 frame per second.

 

[d8veh]

I've noticed that on several occasions, but this time, I ended up going to sleep and leaving the client. Interestingly, I've got a second client there, on another machine, which is fine.
The only difference is the amount of ram available (significantly more on the machine with the problems), and no NPC pilot on the secondary machine.
The machine with the NPC pilot is absolutely churning ram allocation right now though, which is causing the system process to grind everything to a halt.

So, I suspect that Ettanin is correct, it's the NPC pilot causing the entire issue.

I did some experiments with AFK pirate killing. I don't have an NPC pilot. My PC is an i9 with 3090 graphics and 32 gb ram. After leaving my ship in the RES for 12 hrs, the frame rate stutters down to one frame every 3 secs or something like that. My theory is that it's the way the game handles the data for the kills. The more kills you make, the more the stuttering, like the memory to hold the kill data is too small, so it has to stop and transfer it from somewhere inconvenient before anything else can happen. The stuttering isn't constant. It will stutter or lock fro a few seconds, then release for a few.

The longer you stay, the worse everything becomes.

 

[SSMYT]

+1

 

[Northpin]

could be some raw anti-afk-play measure

 

[Mr T]

The frame-rate decrease has been there since the beginning of the game. The longer you stay in a RES, the lower the frame-rate. After 6 hours, you can hardly fly your ship. It's nothing to do with graphics. You can turn the quality and resolution up or down. It makes no difference.

Yes, it's been there for a long time. When I used to do pirate kill missions in Horizons I would sometimes go to a RES. If I did I'd set my graphics settings to medium, which I did find would help increase the framerate. That was a couple of years ago though.

 

[Ettanin]

It's because the NPC subroutines of SLFs are not properly closed when they get destroyed or docked.
NPCs can have SLFs (some Anacodas do) as well which is why it accumulates over time.