OUT OF MEMORY: WE NEED YOUR HELP!

By Frogboy on July 30, 2010 5:23:53 PM from

Elemental Forums

Frogboy

Chief Executive Officer

Join Date 03/2001

+963

There is a nasty memory leak that we're having a heck of a time tracking down.

It doesn't happen consistently and in fact, it doesn't happen to us at all.

Here is what we need:

1. If have experienced out of memory problems, low the game resolution and run the game in a window so that you can bring up that task manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc).

2. On the Processes list, you should see Elemental. Its memory should start at around 600MB and, over the course of a game, creep up to around 1.2GB. This is normal.

3. The memory, once you get going in the game, should NEVER go up by more than 5MB in a given turn. If it does, then whatever is triggering the memory explosion has started.

4. We are looking for saved games, theories, debug.err files, anything that can help us reproduce it. If we can reproduce it, we can eliminate it in hours. But it's the reproducing that's giving us fits.

Thanks!

Hm.. turn 20, taking 1070 MB memory. Also, just built my capitol. I started in the middle of a huge forest with no foodtiles in sight.

I can't really say at what point it started taking >5MB memory, seems to do that all the time.

Turn 37: 1387 MB.

Turn 50: 1590 MB

Crashed at ~1600MB between turns 51 and 52.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5390141/Elem/AutoSave.EleSav

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5390141/Elem/debug.err

The .zip - file is 0kB.. should I also add the crash dump file?

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5390141/Elem/Elemental0_98-2010-07-31T01-46-13-326.dmp

I've no clue what causes this.. but it seems to start pretty early in the game. Crashes tend to happen at end of turns, but had one out of memory error in sovereign editor too (had quit a game and started a new one). This game was on large map, but happens on smaller ones too.

Edit. Added the dump file

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Died on turn 55 at 1650 mb of memory usage. Seems to hop up somewhere around 5 to 7 megabyte at a time I guess until it dies. The memory appears to climb at a steady pace right up until it crashes.

I played by accepting all settings and not changing any of them when I created the game. Resolution was at 1024 x 768 in Window mode.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9592194/debug.err

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9592194/Elemental0_98-2010-07-30T18-30-17-451.dmp

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9592194/AutoSave.EleSav

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Had an Out of memory crash just wondering around.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5899818/debug.err

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5899818/Elemental0_98-2010-07-30T19-26-41-358.dmp

Did not generate a zip file, wish I could tell you more!

forgot to post auto save

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5899818/AutoSave.EleSav

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I was just sitting there and it steadily rose about 50 MB over the course of a minute right after I got a notification that another nation had built a unique structure. I was already in the neighborhood of 1.4 GB of RAM. Here is my saved game file:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9578304/jusfhere.EleSav

and debug:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9578304/jusf_debug.err

I think that's when all of the "Debug Message: WARNING: Scene Node Utility (Leaked Scene Node)" business starts.

If it helps, here are the previous autosaves:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9578304/JUSF_AutoSave.EleSav

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9578304/JUSF_PreviousAutoSave.EleSav

I noticed in the debug.err that it jumped from 1196183 KB to 1268850 KB between turns 93 and 94. It also says this:

Debug Message: WARNING: Could not find animation 'K_Wagon_Idle_01' in animation sub pack 'K_Wagon_Idle_Animations' for animation pack 'WagonAnimationPack'
Debug Message: WARNING: Could not find animation 'K_Wagon_Walk_01' in animation sub pack 'K_Wagon_Walk_Animations' for animation pack 'WagonAnimationPack'

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Here are some questions:

#1 How often are you doing auto-saves?

#2 Are you getting into a lot of tactical battles?

#3 Are you seeing the memory jump 5+ megs for no reason between turns?

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#1: Every three turns.

#2: Not really. In the game above I had maybe 5 or 6 tactical battles in 50 turns, not many more in other games either.

#3: Not sure.. the memory seemed to jump sometimes, but if I don't do anything, it tends to not change.

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Here is a .zip file made following my latest out of memory crash:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9574588/Elemental0_98-2010-07-31T02-49-37-281.zip

I do auto-save every three turns. I wouldn't say I was getting into a lot of tactical battles, no... I think only one actually. The memory usage seemed to go up pretty consistently from the very beginning (unless I do nothing, then it stays even) until it reached 1650 mb and it terminated.

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#1 auto saves set to every 2 turns

#2 every chance I get

#3 I have not been ruining my Task Manager so I don't know!

The first few games I played locked on winning a tactical and displaying the battle results!

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1. Every 5 turns.

2. Only when forced by a quest. That may be when the leaks start happening though...

3. As I described above, I've seen it creep 70 MB in the middle of a turn while not doing anything (not moving the display, nothing).

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Okay, one other idea I have, could you try playing with NO sound whatsoever. I.e. turn off all sound options in the game and see if that affects memory.

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Quoting JaguarUSF,

reply 9

1. Every 5 turns.

2. Only when forced by a quest. That may be when the leaks start happening though...

3. As I described above, I've seen it creep 70 MB in the middle of a turn while not doing anything (not moving the display, nothing).

Was it saving the game? It'll jump a lot during a save game and then it should come back down after saving.

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I got it again as well. It always seems to crash around 1600-1700K. My first post of the OOM, I got a dmpfile, this time I did not.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8949112/7-30/AutoSave.EleSav

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8949112/7-30/debug.err

#1 I didn't change it, so whatever the default setting is.

#2 I dont know what constitutes alot of tactical battles, but I did have about 10 throughout the game. Thats a guess.

#3 I didn't see this post until I just got the OOM. So, not sure how much it's creeping up every turn, but will keep an eye on it.

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No, it wasn't and it didn't come back down.

I have seen significant increases in memory whenever the technology screen pop-ups when you are prompted to pick a new path (the 2nd screen you get, not the first one when you pick which of the tech choices you want), even though it should (in theory) already be loaded into RAM.

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Possible to use windows to create a dump of the process and its memory contents isn't it? I'd be more than happy to do this but my upload is so slow it'd be faster just to fedex UPS you my entire PC.

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Is anyone who is running out of memory NOT running 64-bit Windows?

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EDIT: Doh! I just realized I had a tac battle with some brigands and lost...I guess that was for the city. After zooming in, I saw the rubble.

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Can I also suggest that during the next patch you include a LARGE in game pop up that reads something like:

"IMPORTANT!!! WE NEED YOUR HELP TO LOCATE BLAH BLAH BLAH"

I know its kind of obnoxious, but I imagine a lot of people with the beta don't read the forums that often.

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i don't have the dump file, but the out of memory has happened to me every time I have played the beta and I have the following settings

Game Settings
http://i574.photobucket.com/albums/ss188/brandonm87/Untitled-1.png

Video Settings
http://i574.photobucket.com/albums/ss188/brandonm87/Untitled.png

System Specs:

CPU - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80GHz
CPU Speed - 2.79 GHz, Performance Rated at: 6.975 GHz
RAM - 8 Gb
OS - Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Edition (build 7600), 64-bit
Video Card - GeForce GTS 240
Free Disk Space - 788.1 GB

I tactical battle every chance I get and Auto save every turn

I will collect the dump files and post them on the next occurrence

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Quoting impinc,

reply 16

I've been running it without sound, and so far it hasn't crashed, but memory is still going up. However, I finally noticed that one of my cities is missing. I KNOW I had 3 cities, and now it's only 2. Like it never existed. Weird.

EDIT: Doh! I just realized I had a tac battle with some brigands and lost...I guess that was for the city. After zooming in, I saw the rubble.

The bastards!

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Also able to play for a lot longer with sound completely turned off... currently the usage is 1433 mb and slowly climbing...

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Running it without sound seems to have fixed it no issues yet, memory is hovering at about 1.2 million k, sorry I can't do the conversion in my head to Mb!

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Quoting jeffalford,

reply 21

Running it without sound seems to have fixed it no issues yet, memory is hovering at about 1.2 million k, sorry I can't do the conversion in my head to Mb!

1024K = 1m, 1024m = 1gb, but really it's easier to just divide by 1,000,000, so basically that's about 1.2gb

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I just got another out of memory crash. Dump file is here.

#1. I didn't change the autosave settings, so whatever the default is.

#2. I'd say I probably had 10 or fewer tactical battles.

#3. I did not see any large jumps in memory usage. It was a slow and steady increase over something like 240 turns. As I noted in another thread I was able to get the memory usage to increase by simply zooming out to the cloth map and then back in, over and over again, doing nothing else.

When it finally did crash it was while I was trying to save a game.

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Thanks Spaghettimon, seems odd that a 64 bit Os would report mem. in Kilobytes, guess they got there reasons. remember that from class but was just being lazy! !

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I started a new game and set the autosave to save every turn. Each turn I see the memory bump up about 16M, and then fall back, but when it falls back it's 1 or 2M higher than it was on the previous turn.

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