[ian-reeds-games] Re: Memory problems
- From: Ian Reed <support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: ian-reeds-games@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:18:19 -0600
Hey Carlos,
Thanks for the numbers on memory usage. It did get me to realize that I
was keeping a reference to all unit, item, skill, and effect objects as
well as all their sub objects and never cleaning them up.
This happened when I started keeping a single dictionary that had a
reference to every object based on it's ID. That was to support
multiplayer so that in memory objects could be referenced across
machines using only the ID.
Then I forgot to clean that dictionary out.
As this project supports more and more scenarios it becomes easier to
make mistakes like that.
I've made a fix for that at least.
I won't say it solves all the memory issues but it should help a fair
amount.
Currently the old map gets cleared out whenever you load a new one so
taking the user to the main menu instead of the map pack menu won't make
a difference.
But I still think that's a good idea as it's annoying to have to get
back into the map pack menu, and Allan mentioned it a while back as well.
Whenever a map loads all information from the map pack loads again.
Originally I thought it would be neat as you say to keep old info in
memory so the entire map pack doesn't have to be reloaded as you switch
maps but eventually I just had everything reload when you load a map
because it was simpler and more straight forward.
There are other ideas for improving the speed of a map loading.
For instance, I currently load all map pack music and sounds into memory
whether the map pack uses them or not.
If I changed this code to load them on the fly then initial map load
times would be much better.
Just another thing on my list, smile.
Allan, I wouldn't worry about converting from .wav to .mp3 unless you
want to.
And now if I may ramble to no one in particular.
This app will never be completely free of memory leaks. I think that
must be impossible.
When I was reading up on why Allan was getting out of memory exceptions
while saving repeatedly I found a number of people stating that the
standard .NET Serialization had some native memory leaks.
If something so standard as that with a huge QA team and multiple devs
still has memory leaks then I'm afraid we're just stuck with them in my
games, smile.
But of course I'll still do my best to keep them down to a level where
they don't slow a good machine like Carlos has.
Another thing that makes it difficult to be sure about memory leaks is
that I believe the number we see in task manager includes the entire
memory footprint of the application.
Since C# uses a garbage collector and maintains a managed heap that is
larger than the actual amount of memory you currently have allocated it
can be difficult to accurately determine if the app is actually leaking
memory or if the managed heap is just growing due to fragmentation as
you allocate memory and the GC frees it up.
Additionally since the GC tries not to run unless it needs to there's
still plenty of opportunity to see a high number even after I've cleared
out references to unused objects.
But if you can repeatedly make it grow by large jumps then it's worth
looking into as this was.
It really comes down to making it good enough, since it will never be
perfect, as much as I'd like it to be, smile.
Again, I appreciate hearing about whenever there seems to be a very
large leak as that one.
I hope it's better in the next dev release.
I wonder if Jarek and Mohsin's problems could have been related.
Ian Reed
On 4/22/2013 6:22 PM, Carlos Macintosh wrote:
I was running tb and playing Allan thompson’s starship battles map
pack. It as being all laggy. I am using a computer running a 2ghZ core
2 duo processor with 3GB of ram. That’s fairly speedy. Now, when I
started Allan thompson’s map pac, and played through a couple maps,
the game began to get all laggy. Like it took a second or two to
process commands. I' don’t think that the map pack is the problem, but
the handling of resources. Even just on the main menu at game startup
the game consumes 46mb of memory. When I loaded up tomb robber, the
memory usage jumped to 80 mb. When I returned to the main menu
quitting tomb robber, the memory usage stayed at 78mb. That in itself
is strange, unless you never unload the material used by tomb robber,
which is my theory. Well, then I decided to start starship battles
reloaded on mission 1. It took a while, and when the map loaded memory
usage had spiked to 158 mb! Upon returning to the main menu, memory
usage was still 152 mb. I loaded up a second map from the starship
battles pack, and, again, the memory usage spiked to 234 mb. My theory
is that it loaded up all the sounds and music, ALL OVER AGAIN, which
contributed to the map’s glacial start time. And it never unloaded
them, which spiked the memory usage. So, after playing 5 or 6 of those
star trek maps, and loading 5 or 6 sets of the 94 or so mb of sounds
and music, memory usage could go well above 5 or 600 mb. This is not a
good thing, and, as map pack sizes grow, the damage will be more
pronounced. I suggest the following:
instead of returning a user to the main menu upon victory or defeat of
a map, return them to the menu containing all the maps in the current
campaign. If they press escape to close that menu, unload everything
about the campaign. Also change the option on the battle menu from
“return to the main menu” to “Return to map selection” and return the
user to the map selection menu. This way, time would not be wasted
loading and unloading the same campaign material whenever a user
stoped playing 1 map of a campaign and switched to another. Plus, most
users, as they play a campaign, will go to the next mission. So it
saves time as well. I hope this is helpful, and not just annoying
Thanks
Carlos
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