Memory Leak

[AzuthTheHighOne]

I upgrated my 32 bit windows vists os with 4gb of ram system to the 64 bit version of windows 8 with 8gb of ram. On the 32 bit windows vista system I crashed about once every 2 and a half hours. After I upgraded to the 64 bit version of windows 8 and added 4 more GB of ram I have never crashed once. I think I left it on for 8 hours straight one time without any problems.

[Choffware]

Sorry for my blunt response let me add to this.

 

Windows 7 Pro 64BIT 6GB of memory

 

SWTOR will launch with about 1.4 GB in use from both swtor.exe's

 

Over the course of a few hours game play from switching of characters to loading zones to crafting the memory on the larger swtor.exe will grow to about 3.2GB and eventually textures and load times will strain to load if at all. Even closing the client and going back in the performance is not the same. restarting the computer is obviously a clean slate and restores the game performance back to normal.

 

so while it may not be a memory leak it sure seems like it to me. or the client doesn't know how to dump things out of memory as it moves forward with other tasks. but once that memory fills up to 3.2GB or so the client crashes to desktop.

 

curious... a while back the game had to be run in windows xp computability mode because of some problem with older nvidia drivers. since the nvida driver update happened the game had to be taken out of computability mode... are you running with old nvidia drivers or running in computability mode? Could be chasing a wild goose but figured I ask just in case

[tramm]

curious... a while back the game had to be run in windows xp computability mode because of some problem with older nvidia drivers. since the nvida driver update happened the game had to be taken out of computability mode... are you running with old nvidia drivers or running in computability mode? Could be chasing a wild goose but figured I ask just in case

 

Not in compatibility mode and newest drivers.

[CaptRavenous]

Could also be what you have running on your PC, such as accelerator programs (which are all garbage, and will only put more strain on already strained systems).

 

I've known people to have a dozen or more applications running in their taskbar, not realizing this is the very thing slowing down their PCs and causing crashes.

 

The less your PC is running when you play your games, the better your games will run. I only have two other applications running in my taskbar, anti-virus and a keyboard settings program, nothing more.

 

Unfortunately, though, the problems there could be preventing people from being able to run the game properly number in the thousands. If we were running this game on a console system, and everyone had the same system, they would have a much easier time fixing game bugs. With everyone having PC systems almost as unique as they are, problems such as this become much harder to track down. Add to this that the majority of people having problems do not report these problems properly, and Bioware not having any way of knowing exactly what else you run on your PC unless you grant them full access, and its the proverbial "finding one needle in a million haystacks".

 

The fault does not necessarily lie with the game, or with you, or it could be the fault lies with both. Software is a cruel mistress.

[NasherUK]

Not seen any memory leaks since the beta O_o

 

Really though, 64bit should be a requirement by now. Coding games for 32bit means big limitations, such as memory usage. Opening the game up to fully use 64bit means it's much more capable. But you can bet that once the next gen of consoles come out (end of this year), which will be 64bit, 32bit will quickly fade away and become unsupported. So might as well upgrade.

Edited February 11, 2013 by NasherUK

[Thornsbane]

What you described is not evidence of a memory leak. Rather, its the behavior of a single process overloading the system memory. If you're running a 32-bit OS and a video card capable of good performance in SWTOR, then 3.2GB is probably your limit for usable RAM. (EDIT: You're on 64, so your process limit is 4GB, but some of that is lost to memory mapping and you still have OS overhead, so the likelihood of hitting your physical RAM limit is still pretty likely) Once SWTOR exceeds the amount of available physical RAM, performance will go down the tubes in a hurry, and you'd probably prefer a crash-to-desktop to the memory thrashing that would normally occur.

 

Modern computers don't really ever have unused memory. Memory that isn't being actively used is often used as a quick-cache for data on disks, recently run applications, and a bunch of other minor stuff. When a process eats up a lot of memory it pushes all of those things out of memory, along with the working memory of a bunch of background applications, forcing some of them into the pagefile. Even when the process dies, it will take time to re-populate the cache and move those applications memories out of the pagefile and back into physical memory. While that is happening, you'll see a lot more disk activity and a lot more stuff getting pulled in and out of memory as the system works to reach normality again. It'll be rough for a while, but its totally expected behavior for a system recovering from a single process eating all the physical RAM.

 

Can a memory leak cause an application to use up a huge amount of memory? Sure. But it is far from the only way, and it shouldn't be your first assumption.

 

What you describe would likely be happening at any random time when a large process fires.

 

The crash being described here happens like clock work after a certain amount of time, ie 1-2 hours depending on the user, which is a pretty good sign of a steady memory leak and not a random process using up memory.

 

It seems people here are calling it a memory leak because it looks like one....

[Thornsbane]

I've got the problem, as do many, many other players. I believe it was introduced in version 1.4 - since then, I get maybe 1 - 2 hours play time before the game flickers then crashes to desktop. The problem is very real.

 

It's not my machine; the game ran splendidly prior to 1.4. The problem is within whatever changes BW made to 1.4 that causes those of us with 32-bit boxes to suffer this crash. It certainly does look like a memory leak. The crash can happen any time from loading screen to opening in-game mail to standing around chatting.

 

.

 

This is exactly what happens for me. The times it takes before crash is so steady that lately I can guess when about it is going to crash. Usually loadscreen, or clicking on a npc or thing that brings up a tab.

[soulseekerr]

I as well have this issue and am hoping BW gets around to fixing it someday.

 

Here's brief sysem specs if it helps at all:

AMD Athlon 64 x2 4600+ (2.4ghz x2)

4 gb DDR2

Windows 7 home prem OEM 64bit

Nvidia GTX 560ti 1gb (recent upgrade)

 

Game runs as well as could be expected given the specs initially, but gradually starts to rapidly decline after about 4-5 hours of continuous play. I have noticed that the decline happens much faster if i am in a heavy population area (like the fleets). Usually I can exit the game and restart my pc to get performance back up to where it should be.

 

I also wanted to note that usually if I play for more than 2-3 hours in a stretch I will usually have the game hang when exiting to desktop.

 

Lastly, but not sure if it's related, load screens can be really bad at times. We're talking 2-3 minutes to load a planet when I first land (not exaggerating, i timed it). Generally speaking, the bigger the planet the longer the load screen. I haven't done many endgame flashpoints yet, so I hope that doesn't get to be a serious issue with my endgame experience.

[Merovinjin]

i bought a new computer because of the poor performance from my laptop (which was pretty decent for a laptop i might add) whilst playing this game at the beginning of 2012 but soon after that i quit.

 

i have started playing again in the past 2 weeks and have noticed the game isnt half stressing my computer, the fans are going mad lol and i have been told to close the program by windows because it was using too many resources.

 

my system is;

PCS MAELSTROM T900 BLACK GAMING CASE

Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7-2600 Quad Core (3.40GHz, 8MB Cache)

Motherboard ASUS® P8Z68-V LX: USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs, ATI®CrossFireX

Memory (RAM) 8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (2 x 4GB KIT)

Graphics Card 2GB AMD RADEON™ HD7850 - DVI,HDMI,2 mDP - DX® 11, Eyefinity 4 Capable

Memory - 1st Hard Disk 1TB SEAGATE Barracuda SATA 6Gb/s HDD, 32MB Cache (7200rpm)

CORSAIR 650W ENTHUSIAST SERIES™ TX650 V2-80 PLUS® BRONZE

 

copied and pasted from where i bought it lol

 

EDIT - oh yeah i am using windows 7 64bit also.

Edited March 15, 2013 by Merovinjin

[mrnails]

I have this same issue. I use the following link to "help" with the problem. I say help, cuz while it does greatly help with memory management it doesn't completely fix the problem.

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=585010

[JMCH]

I can confirm there's a memory leak, perhaps not the biggest ever, but affecting performance to a large extent.

 

It's not some 1.4 issue, it's there from start and has become worse over time. It seems SWTOR Unleashed solves the issue, so it has probably something to do with memory caching, swap and disk caching.

 

To reproduce it, it's really easy and no, more than 6GB won't help unless you use a third party ramdrive to compensate for the "optimization" inefficiency. That is simply unacceptable.

 

How to :

 

- switch back and forth between characters, even just 2 of them in the same area

- move between different areas (fleet, planets, Ops, FPs, WZs, instancied heroics), even just 2 of them

 

Over time (ranging from 30 minutes to 4 hours with everyday gameplay), the client takes more and more disk and CPU resources, to the point alt-tabbing, loading and even regular play make your computer seem like a 486SX.

 

It's like if a dictionary growed to the point searching in it takes so much time it's reducing performance instead of increasing it. Could be tied to graphics drivers and/or Windows "optimizations", but one game's optimizations reducing performance are not a driver/OS issue.