SecondLife has a memory leak?

SecondLife has been running great for me for a long time. Gaming rig.

Windows Vista 32 bit
3.0 Dual Core CPU
4 GB RAM
nVidia GeForce 9800 GT 1 GB GPU

Anyway, tonight all of a sudden it started to run like a slide show, and kept locking up, not responding, then recovering slowly. So I brought up my task manager to take a look at things and I noticed SecondLife eating up memory. It went from 250,000 K to 340,000 K in just a couple minutes, even after being restarted. It was climbing through 348,000 when I shut it down.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Well, i think it is some weird thing.

When your SL memory is low lik 250,000k it will run sluggish. For me, it has always been, the lower the memory SL has, the worse it runs. And on my laptop with 1gig of ram, SL would "leak" memory and go from 450-500megs of ram use down to minus 250megs and the world would grind to a sluggish, constant pausing halt.

On my desktop this does not happen. I have noticed SL climb to 800megs of ram use. But that is fine. It is only when the ram use drops does your experience die.

That is what i know to happen with me.

I know other people this is happening to, and so far none of them will do a full system reinstall. I bet there is something installed that is triggering that with SL because that memory dropping/loss thing seems to be either happening or not happening with some systems.

Good luck!

It's a system thing from all the talk I've read over the years here in the forums. Some people have huge problems and some don't have any at all. Five computers that I've been associated with that have run SL all have never had a memory problem. I think the ones who do experience the problem are mostly folks with relatively high end systems with all sorts of stuff running at the same time as SL. Things like instantant messaging, email checkers, anti virus scans, etc thinking that because they have a super fast system with tons of RAM they don't need to pay attention to things like that. And there's the people who have their preferrrences set to play media automatically when they enter a parcel.

Look at what you have running, what your preferrences are set to. Even the fastest comuters in the world can be brought to their knees if you get enough running at the same time. And that little old clunker has not problems at all...........why is that? Think maybe the user of that clunker knows it's limitations?

Various memory leaks have come and gone throughout SL's update history. Some have been more serious than others; most have been pretty minor. But either way, it has leaked more often than it hasn't, as far as I know. Unless it's noticeably affecting the performance of your machine, I wouldn't worry about it.

Is it a memory leak, or does Second Life just use a lot of memory?

Depending on the region you're in and draw distance, ~350MB doesn't sound excessive.

Wether or not this helps, my fiance was having this exact problem.. she would freeze periodically and stuff wouldn't rezz right when she logged in.


She has a decent computer;

Pentium D Dual-Core 2.4ghz
nVidia 9800GTX
4gb RAM
1tb HDD


After disabling streaming media, everything settled for her. Good luck!

Today my SL was using 1,045megs.

Is that a lot? I thought so.

lol Yeah that's pretty friggin high... Mine generally runs at about 250mb. I'm definitely gonna assume you have memory leaks if your client is running over a gb of memory. >.>

250?? Do you have a choppy or pausing experience?

When my laptop ran that low my SL experience collapsed in on itself. But now i am on a desktop.


Right now it is 1076megs - and sitting in the background.

Nope, it runs pretty smooth.


Right now I'm running at a 25 fp/s average... on a laggy sim, using the Snowglobe Viewer.

222,428kb for the viewer + another 13,912kb for the voice thing.
That's about what it's at constantly... usually my FPS is a bit higher drops pretty low whenever I get on a busy sim though.

Wowzers. My SL does not have a memory leak, it has a memory geyser

I am using the Cool Viewer, maybe it is supposed to use as much as it can or needs? I am often in a sim with 30-50 people. Settings are on Ultra, anti-aliasing is at x8, and my machine has 8gb ram with a 2.8ghz quad core.

It runs really smooth.

Mine are just on High, with custom settings... Anisotropic Filtering is on and Anti-alias is at 16x.

But if it's running smooth and not really bogging down your computer, I wouldn't worry about it at all.

The harder you push SL, the more memory it'll use. Longer draw distances will eat up memory fast.

You're okay until it gets between 1.2 and 1.3GB, then the viewer crashes.

Have either of you reduced your swap (or page) file? I have my set at the minimum Windows recommends. When was the last time you did a thorough disk clean up.........like deleting all but the the last restore point that Vista has made for you (you know that Vista creates restore point at the drop of hat, don't you?). And a complete defrag of your hard drive..........when was the last time you did that?

And on the "gaming rig".............geeze, I guess I have one of those too!!! Woo wooo............who'd thunk an off the shelf Lenovo Desktop was one of those.

I am running Windows 7.

My machine is set to defrag every night on schedule so my daily fragmentation level is literally 0.0% on my other drives to 0.3% on my primary drive.

- I am not sure about Restore. I have no idea where that is. I will go looking for it and delete that restore points. I have no problems and have not installed anything in the past 3 weeks, except SL viewers.

I LOL'd in RL.

I'm not terribly worried about how much memory SL uses. As far as I'm concerned it can have all it wants. That's exactly what I built this computer for (Windows 7 x64 w/8GB memory here, too). I hack the SL executable so it can use more.

I let Windows manage virtual memory, and have not observed any advantage to doing otherwise.

I don't delete system restore points, because I'd rather have them and not need them than the other way around. I'm not sure how Vista handle them, but Windows 7 limits how much space system restore uses to 2% of the drive, so it's only a few gigabytes at most.

Personally, I think on an adequately large hard drive in a computer running a modern OS (NT based Windows or OS X) defragmenting hard drives on a frequent basis is largely a waste of time.

If you ever come to the point of needing to restore you computer from a restore point, what is the point of a restore point that was created 3 weeks ago when you have 21 since then?. The advantage of not letting Windows manage your virtual memory is really simple. Windows will allot about 10 times what it needs for that paging file......fill it up with all the SL textures that Windows tosses there it will slow you down. Slows you down considerably depending on how large your HD is...........unless you have a 10,000rpm HD, that is (not many have those). And on the defraging the hard drive.......what you say about being a waste of time goes against every known Windows expert's advice. Defragging is an important part of good system maintenance. Defragging once a week or every day.....yeah, you are just killing time in most cases unless you have done a lot of instalations and uninstallations in that period of time. Once a month is what I've read as a good schedule.....that's about what I do.

And LOL all you want.........I don't have memory problems. I don't crash often, I don't lag much, I maintain about 30 FPS most anywhere in SL. And all that is on a 2 year old off the self Lenovo desktop running Window Vista 32 bit with 3 gigs of DDR2 667 mhz memory (that is not particularly fast if you don't know). What do I do that you don't and not have problems? I don't know.......I simply maintain my computer per experts (I mean real experts........not someone claiming expertise) recommendations.

I don't have any problems at all, my SL runs great. Even when I have 3-4 viewers open.


I was LOLing at the gaming rig statement.... I don't defrag hardly ever, I don't run no Anti-virus/anti-spyware software... I don't do anything "special" to make my SL run better (just plugged up my comp, and installed) I usually have WoW opened in the background aswell... I still manage 30fps almost constantly, it drops a little bit on really high population sims... as would yours and anyone else... cause latency {that you are gonna experience, and you will.. cause you're no exception to bogged down Sims) is gonna effect your performance, regardless. Maybe your experts can explain that to you.


I never delete restore points, but... that's because I don't have automatic restore points enabled... Now if we could get back on the topic of the thread... Second Life does have memory leaks... it's usually not really a big deal though. But I suggest to those folks that are having freezing/periodic crashing etc... to disable streaming media cause that absolutely worked for my fiance. She's been online all day now an she hasn't had a problem since. Good luck to anyone else having these issues!

Defragmenting your hard drive and deleting old system restore points have nothing to do with how much memory Second Life uses.

The memory problem I had with Second Life was that it would crash when it ran out of memory when I pushed the viewer past its limits with very long draw distances. It had nothing to do with system maintenance or tweaking.

If I found things like frequent defragmenting, manually managing the swapfile, or fretting over a few hundred megabytes of old system restore points made a significant difference in my computer's performance, I'd be doing them.

OooOooooOooo

How does a person do that?

What are the advantages of letting SL use more memory? Does it run better? Faster

The defrag in Windows 7 runs automatically, as does the backup. And on the rare occasion that I am on the computer at 1-3am when it runs those 2 things, i don't even notice it is happening with my Quad while in SL. But on my Duo Core, my SL totally locked up when the back up kicked in. So, it really is not a waste of time for me since its a scheduled thing.

I figured having a defrag'd HD would be a good idea since SL is constantly writing files to the drive - I have SL open for roughly 12 hours a day sometimes more. But, i am not a computer expert and all my computer know how has literally been learned due to SL.

Here's what I did to it:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/64-bit-vista-gaming,2250-5.html

It increases the amount of memory SL can use under 64-bit Windows. This improves stability because SL doesn't run out of memory around 1.2GB. Otherwise it appears to run the same for me. There are warnings about all kinds of possible badness happening to /LAA hacked executables, so if you do that be prepared for potential weirdness, although I've not encountered any.

SL would crash on me when I set really long draw distances in graphics heavy regions. Now it doesn't.