Devs, looks like you have a memory leak...

[szalkerous]

I know this is a technical issue, but I figure this aspect of it might be good to bring up here in short form. I'll submit the rest through the proper channels, you just never know if it ever gets to the dev desk...


http://i35.tinypic.com/6sfe4z.jpg

Exhibit A: Initial startup of PC, fresh DDO session.

http://i38.tinypic.com/4i1ki9.jpg

Exhibit B: After running DDO for 3 hours.

Both screenshots of memory usage were recorded at the exact same position in the world, with the exact same # of players in the area.

I started my snooping after having DDO crash constantly every 3-4 hours ever since the last MOD release. For the record, I tried DX10, but have since shut it off, having blamed it originally for the BSOD occassions. No other game, DX9 or DX10 causes this type of behavior. But the crashing is something I will submit to support along with the memory dump and dxdiag.

Not sure what kind of garbage collection the client is using, but there's definitely some significant leakage going on there.

Food for thought!

-Szalk

[frugal_gourmet]

This does not mean a memory leak.

[Impaqt]

This does not mean a memory leak.

correct, this alone does not mean there is a Memory leak.. But there is one for sure..... Probobly many.... I've seen my client climb to almost 2 gigs of ram useage......

[frugal_gourmet]

correct, this alone does not mean there is a Memory leak.. But there is one for sure..... Probobly many.... I've seen my client climb to almost 2 gigs of ram useage......

The bar indicating the amount of memory used in a managed application isn't a reliable indicator of a memory leak. If memory is available, it may attempt to use it. If memory runs out, it may attempt to free it.

[Lorien_the_First_One]

I'll join the 'that doesn't mean there is a leak' crowd. There are lots of good reasons not to purge every byte of data instantly.

Doesn't mean there isn't a leak.. but it doesn't mean there is.

[KoboldKiller]

I thought I had a memory leak once, but then I couldn't remember if I did. :D

[Impaqt]

The bar indicating the amount of memory used in a managed application isn't a reliable indicator of a memory leak. If memory is available, it may attempt to use it. If memory runs out, it may attempt to free it.

No Aplication should obsessivly comsume more than half your physical ram. THats what page files are for. If its not a leak, Its poor programming... I'd rather give the Devs the benefit of the doubt and hope its simply a Memory Leak.

[Lorichie]

No Aplication should obsessivly comsume more than half your physical ram. THats what page files are for. If its not a leak, Its poor programming... I'd rather give the Devs the benefit of the doubt and hope its simply a Memory Leak.

I concur, i see these same numbers and sometimes higher. There are times when i'm logged in for 12 hours or more. I make it a habit to log in and out quickly more often and i notice less issues than others have if i do. Then again i rarely have any issues, i just get nervous when i see numbers that high.

That being said, i'm not sure if it is a leak on Turbine's end but i can say for sure that in some of the games i beta, i have these same numbers, and much higher and it has been, every time.

R

[Lorien_the_First_One]

No Aplication should obsessivly comsume more than half your physical ram. THats what page files are for. If its not a leak, Its poor programming... I'd rather give the Devs the benefit of the doubt and hope its simply a Memory Leak.

If an application assumes it is the primary app running then the programmers may deliberately go after RAM as a faster alternative to the swap file. SQL comes to mind as an example of this. Given all the past performance problems maybe the Turbine programmers figured that when DDO was up you were probably just playing DDO.

[Impaqt]

If an application assumes it is the primary app running then the programmers may deliberately go after RAM as a faster alternative to the swap file. SQL comes to mind as an example of this. Given all the past performance problems maybe the Turbine programmers figured that when DDO was up you were probably just playing DDO.


Well, that indeed would be a very good example of Poor coding...... Instead of making the calls more efficient, Make them more accessable......

[frugal_gourmet]

No Aplication should obsessivly comsume more than half your physical ram. THats what page files are for. If its not a leak, Its poor programming... I'd rather give the Devs the benefit of the doubt and hope its simply a Memory Leak.

It's not really consuming it. That memory is still available for use if needed.

[Impaqt]

It's not really consuming it. That memory is still available for use if needed.

Is it? I've NEVER noticed the ram useage go down. It simply continues to increase.. As it increases my game actually becaomes less responsive. Small lag spikes whneI change gear and cast spells too....Even if I open up a few IE Pages, Fire up some other aps like Word or Excel (I'll ofthen have these up if I'm designing a character or writing a guide) and I've run other things on my unused Processor cores like F@H.

The DDO Ap just continues to use more and more memory until you physically shut it down and restart it. It doesnt appear to be dynamic at all.

[Lorien_the_First_One]

The DDO Ap just continues to use more and more memory until you physically shut it down and restart it. It doesnt appear to be dynamic at all.

And that's a problem. Even if it is coded to be a hog for data access speed, it should also know how to get out of the way as other apps are loaded and eventually it should know to start unloading things that are no longer needed.

[Auran82]

Not sure if its just me, but I have noticed since MOD 8 came out that when I alt+tab out of DDO to load a firefox page or something else the computer seems to hang for a few seconds taking DDO out of focus and when I try to go back.

Could just be me though.

[baddax]

I was in that 3 hour marathon quest last night and i think I have a memory leak! Not sure if this has any bareing but i think you were also laggy in various parts of the quest. I know also you mentioned something about a blue screen while in meridia. I find it strange, but i had very few lag issues and i checked my memory after we got done and did not see anything strange.

[Sibyl]

Try alt-enter when your client starts hitching and lagging. See if your performance gets better.

PS: Vista can make games take up a lot more memory than they would under XP. Have you installed Service Pack 1?

[szalkerous]

This does not mean a memory leak.

I'm giving the developers the benefit of the doubt in that they would not allow the application to glutton itself on memory without releasing it after it is no longer reasonably necessary. That's a cardinal sin of software.

Also, I have as well, watched the peak memory consumption climb with no return to original size. I expect minor inflation in all things, but to double in size without an apparent cause seems to me there's memory being "leaked" (i.e. handles being lost after a malloc - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_leak )

But I get far ahead of myself- I'm not here to point fingers, I'm here to offer my example to the dev team for their own investigation... and if there's anything else needed of me from that perspective, I'm a PM away.

-Sz

[szalkerous]

I was in that 3 hour marathon quest last night ...

OT: That was a hell of a marathon! We'll have to coordinate another attempt sometime in the future.

[query]

or the "Virtual Memory" errors (luckily never got a BSOD or computer crash?)


I suspect memory leak if those with double my computer resources see the exact same trending (and yeah that Vista w SP 1 or XP w SP 3 is installed.)

[Xithos]

I am seeing the same thing and having similar issues sometimes when switching equipment and getting that stutter.

[Grimgore]

Is it? I've NEVER noticed the ram useage go down. It simply continues to increase.. As it increases my game actually becaomes less responsive. Small lag spikes whneI change gear and cast spells too....Even if I open up a few IE Pages, Fire up some other aps like Word or Excel (I'll ofthen have these up if I'm designing a character or writing a guide) and I've run other things on my unused Processor cores like F@H.

The DDO Ap just continues to use more and more memory until you physically shut it down and restart it. It doesnt appear to be dynamic at all.


/signed

Same issue, the available parsed memory should be able to be reallocated but that is part of the profile of the program, not the PC. It keeps pulling and holding mem until my PC craps out. I am running an overclocked Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 Quad CPU, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX, 2GB RAM, and a RAID 0 set of hard drives and after 4+ hours, I get bad memory references. No other system has this issue (I can play LOTR for days without pause) so I think there at least needs to be some look into it.

[Lorichie]

This morning i paid particular attention to this

I started the session upon logging in with the following:

0-1 percent of cpu used
1.2 mb ram being used
which was 30 ish percent
This is for vista sp1

logged in and the following:
472,000
<5 percent of cpu used
1.75 mb ram being used
47 ish percent

after six hours
1,125,000
12 percent cpu used
2.75 mb ram being used
70 percent

Note: at the six hour mark those numbes were fluctuating wildly, up to78 percent down to 68 percent. I just sat each time for ten minutes and just watched, same character, same location.

Note, i always play in windowed mode, and always have firefox up in background, perusing forums during gameplay downtime. Those numbers might be a bit off as a result of that, but the increase over time, consistently shouldnt be happening.

Note 2: after playing for a time i've also noticed that Turbine launcher exec will increase from about 1200-to as much as 98k the other night.

After two hours of play right now my numbers show:

743,000
12 percent cpu
57 percent memory
2.26 gig

so after logging in, in two hours my ram usage has gone up 1 gig

Now i could very well be forgetting something and while these specific instances may be flawed, this seems to be the average across the board with more than the few players that have posted..

Just a thought,

R

[SneakThief]

On my box (XP sp2), you dont actaully even have to "Play" to see this effect. You can just load up to the character screen and leave it up over night. To me, that says there is something wrong and not just the game loading up resources and purposefully not realsing them.

[szalkerous]

It's fascinating to see the responses from other players, which seems to cement my suspicion of consumption.

Also, it goes as an honorable mention (not a supplemental point to the discussion) that the game requirements show 512MB required, ~1GB recommended. I suspect if I had 1GB in XP, or 2GB (we'll double it) in Vista, I would quickly notice the system paging off due to memory limit.

The ironic aspect is that huge titles like Supreme Commander and Crysis have recommendations set between 1 and 1.5GB of RAM, and I don't see these applications exhibiting the same behavior...

[Missing_Minds]

No Aplication should obsessivly comsume more than half your physical ram. THats what page files are for. If its not a leak, Its poor programming... I'd rather give the Devs the benefit of the doubt and hope its simply a Memory Leak.

stick in 4 gigs of ram into an XP box and see just how much swap file space you have.

Errr... guess what. None. XP will actually disable it at 4 gigs, you have to re enable it.

BTW, OP, I noticed you used these words. "exact same". So are you telling us you logged in and did not move at all, you didn't play the game, nor do anything else at your computer? You just "logged in" and that was it. You did nothing else? You had your character stand in the same place and do nothing but stand.. and stand... and stand.. for hours.

If that is the case, where were you standing? As for any player that runs buy, you will have to load more and more skins to show these off and chances are good that these "maps" aren't dumped instantly.

Also, how much memory did you offset loading? It is an option you have to help with load times due to graphics.

[Lorichie]

Ok, i've now been playing for around seven hours.

1,079,440
3.04 gig
76percent memory

only this and normal browser in background as i usually do...

update

R

[Lundivar]

This is something I had started to look at. I run XP with 2 gigs ram and no swap file. Been running it like that for years, and never had a DDO issue.

I seem to stabilize at approx 1.2 gigs ram for DDO, which I had always figured was in ngood part the internal texture cache which exceeded the 512meg on the video card (everything on very or ultra high, ) instead of re-loading new textures from HD ( ie: running around the market place criss crossing other players with new textures). Changing areas or entering quests seem to particularly affect memory consummed size. An algorithm maybe on used textures...

The game also cleans out nicely when I close it. I don't see a memory leak.

L.

[Sibyl]

/signed

Same issue, the available parsed memory should be able to be reallocated but that is part of the profile of the program, not the PC. It keeps pulling and holding mem until my PC craps out. I am running an overclocked Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 Quad CPU, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX, 2GB RAM, and a RAID 0 set of hard drives and after 4+ hours, I get bad memory references. No other system has this issue (I can play LOTR for days without pause) so I think there at least needs to be some look into it.

Are you using a skin, by any chance?

[Riggs]

Maybe related, or not, butsince Mod 8 the load times have increased exponentially.

Before the mod loading up for the first time a character would take about 20-30 seconds say.

Now it can take 3 minutes. Before the status bar would move across the screen, maybe pause for a couple seconds, but not take long. Now pretty much every time, the status bar wont move for a full 1-2 minutes, and sometimes it stops a second time for another gap where the hard drive is running madly and nothing is moving.

Blaming mod 8 issues on one players skins is really missing the point - that many people are posting about the same issues all right after a patch. There are no coincidences.

[query]

now the swap file info...

*throws hands up in the air*


Now i dunno what's doing what anymore....

another example of Non euclidian geometry with Quantum Physiscs/Astrophysics/String Theory that is Turbine's Client.

(Okay, not THAT severe, but it sure *FEELS* like it sometimes :p)

[Lundivar]

Maybe related, or not, butsince Mod 8 the load times have increased exponentially.

Agreed, startup load times ARE much, much longer with the HD spinning, thought it was just me.

[MetaSyn]

agreed with mem leak, been saying it for sometime now. can run AOC on full sets not a prob, but after playing DDO for quite a few hours, need a client restart to clean it up. i find this to be nothin more than annoying and unexcusable

[Korvek]

I'm getting this as well, though to a much lower degree, likely because I'm running XP with Very Low graphics settings(Heck, I can barely run Medium).

It usually ran at around 120-125k K, now it ranges from 360-480k K

[Garth_of_Sarlona]

every time you zone into a new area DDO will load in the textures and world for that area and it's not unbelievable that the game will not unload the previous worlds in order to speed up subsequent load time of those previous worlds. In fact, I expect the game will rely on the OS to page unused memory to disk if there are areas of the world that the player hasn't visited in a long time (during one session). This kind of behavior seems perfectly acceptable.

One has to bear in mind that the 'memory usage' from task manager potentially includes pages that are currently backed by disk and not just physical memory and so will not impact on system performance unless accessed. In fact, the new SuperFetch algorithms in Windows Vista will actively proactively pull files from disk and swap them into the working set before they are even needed in order to increase performance and reduce IO latency of the system.

Now, if you sat in the same place for a day without zoning in/out of any new areas and the memory consumption was going steadily up, then I would consider that a 'memory leak'.

Garth

[branmakmuffin]

every time you zone into a new area DDO will load in the textures and world for that area and it's not unbelievable that the game will not unload the previous worlds in order to speed up subsequent load time of those previous worlds. In fact, I expect the game will rely on the OS to page unused memory to disk if there are areas of the world that the player hasn't visited in a long time (during one session). This kind of behavior seems perfectly acceptable.
Not quite on topic, but not just acceptable, expected. Why throw something out of memory until you need that memory for something new?

[Sibyl]

Maybe related, or not, butsince Mod 8 the load times have increased exponentially.

Before the mod loading up for the first time a character would take about 20-30 seconds say.

Now it can take 3 minutes. Before the status bar would move across the screen, maybe pause for a couple seconds, but not take long. Now pretty much every time, the status bar wont move for a full 1-2 minutes, and sometimes it stops a second time for another gap where the hard drive is running madly and nothing is moving.

Blaming mod 8 issues on one players skins is really missing the point - that many people are posting about the same issues all right after a patch. There are no coincidences.

It's not missing the point (or blaming) if there is a bug with skins. UI skins get loaded at the same time as your character gets loaded into the world.

I asked for this detail because other than system specs, this thread doesn't really talk about how each person's DDO client is individually set up. Not many people mentioned whether they were using DX10 versus DX9, hardware versus software sound, Very High/High/Medium texture resolution, etc.

PS: When a program uses a lot more memory than you expect it to, and that memory use climbs over time without reaching a steady state, this is called memory bloat. A memory leak is when you quit a program and it does not give back all the memory it held, resulting in some system memory no longer being available to any process.

[Gratch]

Using Vista-64 SP1 on 6 gigs of memory. I routinely have DDO, WAR, ventrillo, and firefox running. Load times are non-existent (except during the database hiccup right after Mod 8 came out). I have noticed that DX9 runs fine for hours. DX10, otoh, is usually fine (maybe a few fps slower than DX9) though DX10 does seem to get into a buggy state sometimes where the fps goes to about 10% of what it should be (80 to 8). Hitting alt-enter twice (takes about 2 secs to resolve) or zoning gets rid of this DX10 issue.

Warhammer is almost always at more memory used than DDO. Both are at max settings/draw 8xAA/16xAF. Warhammer also gets messed up pretty badly with a few alt-enter's between windowed and full mode. So currently, I'm happier with DDO's client though WAR is still an infant engine wise so I expect at least it's alt-enter buggishness to go away.

I believe there may also be a problem launching the DDO-Client in full screen mode with DX10 enabled. Many times the client launches and then disappears. I haven't seen this problem if the startup mode is windowed.

[szalkerous]

I think this thread is starting to derail from the original topic, so I'll try to guide it back on track here...

To address model skins and whatnot, and other variables in the world, I'll clarify my results.

The game DOES do cleanup, at all times. There is indication that a lot of the textures are dumped upon transitioning around in the world. As you move around in the game, watch the process memory consumption. This is easily indicated by moving between zones- you will see a spike in memory as it loads up the new textures and zone information, and a slow decay as it cleans up unneeded data. The memory management issue becomes present as it does not clean ALL the data. Logging in and moving between the same two zones over and over will eventually cause you to eat more and more memory. Given that an end user has no visibility into the code, I can't comment on whether this is a true leak situation (i.e. lost handles) or whether or not it is continually amassing more handles to the same data, in different portions of memory (i.e. textures or data loaded more than once, unnecessarily).

Now take the previous mentioned theory, and apply it to standing still in a zone. As player models and textures are rendered in screen, it is possible the game is continually loading and (partially) unloading these data items in the same situations.

Finally, I will disagree with the following statement made:

"When a program uses a lot more memory than you expect it to, and that memory use climbs over time without reaching a steady state, this is called memory bloat. A memory leak is when you quit a program and it does not give back all the memory it held, resulting in some system memory no longer being available to any process."

Given the memory management present in today's operating systems, once a process has exited the memory manager should automatically free any memory that was allocated to that process. The only exception to this that I could see would be if the memory manager determines there is an abstract relation with an existing process, that could bear rights to the memory in question- for all purposes, this is not the case with dndclient.exe that I can see.

[szalkerous]

One other interesting bit of behavior I have noticed is that during this intensive memory consumption, logging out of your character back to the selection screen does not dump all the currently allocated memory as I would have expected it to- If anything, it exacerbates the situation more so.

[Strakeln]

One other interesting bit of behavior I have noticed is that during this intensive memory consumption, logging out of your character back to the selection screen does not dump all the currently allocated memory as I would have expected it to- If anything, it exacerbates the situation more so.I storngly suspect that DDO keeps landscape textures in memory as long as is feasibly possible.

I say this based off of a lot of experiences playing DDO with a very old computer with insufficient memory, compared to my new top-of-the-line version. The behavior differences (as well as differences in load time into a zone based on whether I'd been there that session or not) make me think that DDO will not drop the textures and whatnot out of memory until it is either completely shut down or needs to deallocate space for other zones.

All of this is my opinion, based solely on subjective observations. As such, it is all subject to being completely false.

[Hence]

DDO started crashing my computer after Mod 8 with a BSOD. I thought it was because my video card was over heating... I run XP SP3 with 3 gig ram. I had never had a problem when playing DDO for hours and hours at a time until the first Hardware Update right before Mod 8. After the first Hardware update I noticed severe playing conditions, lags that would freeze my character but not the sound, graphic anomalies, and BSOD's.

Now that I think about it, I see a similar theme here. Everyone is Alt+Tabing out of DDO and running browsers and such. I noticed that DDO will play very smooth until I Alt+Tab out. Could this have something to do with it?

Please take a look!

[Sibyl]

The game DOES do cleanup, at all times. There is indication that a lot of the textures are dumped upon transitioning around in the world. As you move around in the game, watch the process memory consumption. This is easily indicated by moving between zones- you will see a spike in memory as it loads up the new textures and zone information, and a slow decay as it cleans up unneeded data. The memory management issue becomes present as it does not clean ALL the data. Logging in and moving between the same two zones over and over will eventually cause you to eat more and more memory.

This is good info, and I hope a dev comes here and reads this, since it sounds like it could be easily reproduced on their end. Bloating without end on systems that way exceed the min spec (eventually requiring heavy use of the paging file) does not sound like a desired behavior.

A friend of mine mentioned that the definitions of "leak" and "bloat" have changed since the days of the dinosaurs. So you have me there. :D

[Strakeln]

I have noticed that DDO gets very skippy when I alt-tab out and inadverdently end up in windowed mode (happens sometimes, no idea why).

I always assumed it was due to my now running a non-native resolution on my very large monitor when in windowed mode, which makes sense to me.