Memory leak in new patch

With this latest patch, City of Heroes is using massively more memory on my PC than it did before. Previously, it would typically use around 600-700 MB when playing. Now it's using around that at load, and by the time I log in a character, it's up above 900 MB. (No other changes to my PC.)

Moreover, the amount of memory used goes up constantly, even if I sit somewhere by myself and do nothing. The climb is fastest when logged in, but merely sitting at the character selection screen will cause memory to climb slowly, 4K at a time; this can be sped up by simply moving the mouse pointer around, but not clicking anything.

An /unloadgfx will cause the memory usage to drop very slightly, but it will begin climbing immediately.

While CoH memory usage has always crept up in I15 as the game was running, this is a huge boost in the memory used, and continuous consumption. (To my recollection, the tendency to leak a lot of memory was new with I15; I periodically have to restart the I15 client to reduce memory consumption, whereas I could leave it running indefinitely previously without it trying to gobble a ton of RAM.)

Could be a memory leak the last one would crash the client after using up about 1.9GB but that was a long time ago.

1.2GB is the normal amount of memory use for me lately after an hour or 2 of playing, it generally doesn't go above that amount, so 900MB isn't much really.

It will climb up from about 600MB right away to 1.2GB over time, every zone, every player that comes within a certain range, every new scenery, every new creature, the market, chat text, etc etc all constantly use up more memory on purpose to improve performance.

I doubt its a memory leak, I have played for 4 hours or more without problems, chances are you have changed something and forgot to mention it, either a new video card or you changed some in game settings.

Get more memory if its bothering you now, 2GB minimum.

I have 4 GB of RAM, but having CoH constantly eat more memory, regardless of whether more memory is available to it, is still undesirable.

I changed absolutely nothing. I really mean that. I know, yes, that people say, "oh but I forgot I did X". Nothing, from one day to another.

Somebody else reported the same thing.

Personally, I have not had any issues. My client is currently reporting about 1.2G, which is normal for me.

As I stated in the other thread, there does seem to be some memory issues while using AE or base editing for long periods of time, but that doesn't seem to affect everybody, and has been around way before this new patch.

As Hugginator said, the client would usually crash around 1.9G of memory usage. That's because 32-bit applications are limited to 2G each.

I have seen some similar activity. I didn't pay a lot of attention to usage before, but do remember it staying under 1GB most of the time. Now I am consistently around 1.2 and am getting more choppiness and "other people rubber banding". It doesn't seem to be network latency, but more my client taking longer to "catch up" when someone runs across the room or jumps. I thought it was DXP related, but still see it.

Some more anecdotal evidence is that on the rare occasion I leave the game running overnight, it has crashed without enough memory to even dump the heap.

I also have 4G of memory, though I run a 32 bit OS on my gaming rig, so we'll call it 3.

I have 2 GB and I frequently run two instances. I did so last night and the game seemed a bit more sluggish than previous but I also have not restarted the system in several weeks so the sluggishness with two instances could be a result of that.

I'll start checking my RAM usage at random times to see if it's different from how it used to be.

Yeah, I made the other post, but. . .as I said there. Mine before yesterdays patch it would SPIKE at around 110MB. . . now I'm constantly sitting at around 900+MB

Sorry, something smells fishy to me. I was neither in MA or Base Edit, it is sitting at 900 almost as soon as I load up

Well, for me it has for a long while used 1.0 - 1.2 GB, and I haven't seen any changes there.

My game has started using much more memory. i used to never get close to a gig of used memory unless i was dual boxing. I tend to crash upon entering a map when a large group of npc's fire off their alpha shot. i get the dreaded sound loop of doom and the crash report wondow comes up shortly after that. been this way since about a week before dblxp weekend and still happens today.

Yep, I was paying attention to this last night and something got borked. My RAM usage for CoH got as high as 1.3GB. It has never gone that high before.

It got even stranger when I loaded a second instance of the game. Both instances would intermittently freeze and get the 'Lost Connection to Mapserver' message. From one instance using over 1GB, it seems they would fight each other down and ended up with both instances around 100MB each and laggy as hell. I've never seen the game use that LITTLE memory after being played for a while and it clearly impacted performance.

Was just about to post a seperate thread but I think this may be what's causing problems for me.

2 days ago, the game ran fine, flawlessly. Now, after the patch I'm having a massive problem eveytime I alt-tab out to my browser, music software, anything, the system completely freezes for a anywhere up to 30 seconds. Even worse, I have a dual screen system and when I move to the other screen the same thing happens.

As I said, nothing has changed, not a single thing, even checked to see if there were any updates to windows that ight have caused it but since last week. I've cleaned out my drivers and updated them to the latest nvidia ones for my card (9800 GT) and had no luck.

COuld this memory leak be the issue for me or am I looking at something else entirely?

Since the last patch was last Thursday the 6th and if it ran fine two days ago, the 9th then the conclusion is something else changed on your system. Like today's big Windows Update.

Just out of curiosity, do you have the Alt and the Tab keys set to their defaults?
(IIRC) both are setup as commands (Tab =target next enemy) & (Alt =a power tray swap" command)?

I say (iirc) because I changed mine long ago, for better (IMO) Improved Targeting-Fu, and no accidental tray swapping.
Their was/(may still be?) also a stupid Windows *cough*B.S.function*cough* - that can (or used to) kick-in if you hit alt 5 times in a row, called "sticky keys" or some such name, which I did my best to kill-off completely... although it was quite roach-like in its capacity to keep going on despite being squished repeatedly.

Anywho, I do still have commands tied to my alt and tab keys, but they seem to "play well with others" more so now, vs. how they used to with the default keybinds...

I might suggest you try using Ctrl-Esc as an alternative way to "tab out" of the game - which in my experience - brings up the start menu & the task bar. From there... I can mouse over to other minimized programs in the task bar, or hit the "show desktop" icon in my quick launch bar and go from there.

I think this might help - to minimize your 30 sec. 'freeze-ups' Coin_ - the game has never seemed to like being issued a command (a tray swap or whatever) while being 'tabbed-out' of... (Maybe it gets it's feeling hurt?)

FWIW, I also think the game is leaking memory a bit (again) recently... And, the Task Manager seems to agree - it's (appears) to be eating up more memory after a couple hrs of play. Especially, if I'm using the market and making trips back & forth to a SG Base - whether its via Vet 'Base TP' or using the regular Base Portal...

And I've repeatedly crashed to REALLY old-school pop-up:
"CoH has encountered a problem, - Ignore, De-bug, Stop Program, etc. to continue"...
It's happened most often while trying to zone back in from a Base - and/or - if I go afk in my base for more than 15-20 mins.

(that just my 2 cents for ya)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville City of Heroes didn't fail, City of Heroes was killed. If a 747 dropped on your house, you'd say you were killed, not you failed to find a safer dwelling.

For the record, I was standing in City Hall for a while yesterday while browsing the forums. I was randomly going back and forth chatting in various global channels, but not really doing much else in the game.

At some point (a couple hours later), I got a Windows error (not game error) saying that City of Heroes has encountered an issue and needs to be shut down. I didn't think about the memory issue at the time, or I would have checked before hitting End Task. It's possible the client somehow reached 2GB of usage and crashed out. Besides this one instance, I havn't had any issues, but I'll definately keep an eye on it to provide more information next time.