Is 750Mb of memory for SL normal?

I checked one of our two machines the other day (after several hours on SL) and the total memory usage in Task Manager on a Windows XP machine was around 750Mb. Is this a normal amount of RAM to be using or are there memory leaks in SL? At that amount of memory the commit level was well over the 1Gb of physical memory and I saw caching to hard drive, which slows SL down considerably.

However I also noticed on my other machine that memory usage was hovering closer to half of that (350-400Mb tops) but only over a short period of time.

Is SL full of holes which cause the memory usage to creep up? Is there some way of limiting the memory, or just maximizing it? Or are we talking relogs and reboots?

I'd be interested to hear about other experiences of this issue.

Depends how many avatars and textures and view distance, i can easy use 900mb ram at certain sims, why its highly recommended having least 2gig ram in SL ~.o;

Highest i ever managaed to waste ram was about 1650mb ram use in 1 SL client.
(512 view distance, 40+ avatars, yes it was sluggish : p)

Opening the map used to eat your ram , now that they changed so its useless and only closest 3 zoom that actually shows islands it doesnt use so much ram, tho ... its completly useless...did i mention its useless ? = p

FYI.........I been loadingup to 750MB alot these days. Its unreal how much its loadingup these days. First Look Has been really eating up Resources....

Here is the thing about BW i had it maxed and alot of pocketloss was occuring and i have more then enough memory and CG resources to hold max BW. But withe current pilelines SL can`t keep up with Users BW. Heance setting at 500 and slightly raising this well lower Pockeloss cause less drag on useage.

were both machines running windows XP ?

with windows 2k pro my computer consumes about 512 +- mb

the GF's computer with windows xp ueses about 768, which ive always attribuited with XP's long list of TSR programs and lick your butt wizards that are always too convient for my tastes

I keep mine VERY slim on running programs. I actually have the two main run keys in the registry bookmarked and any time I install an app, I check to see if there are any changes... lol

It runs ~500MB ish on mine, although I've seen it get up to 700. It's not going to pass that, as I only have a Gig of RAM anyway

Someone asked if both machine I was running SL on were XP. The answer is yes. But one is a dual core machine with 2gb of ram, and apart from general SL issues it runs okay. The other machine is a single core with 1gb of ram.

I am very cautious about background processes although I know my wife uses a graphics program, outlook and IE with SL on that 1Gb machine. This usually puts the machine over 1gb of memory and the machine drops to it's knees.

Personally I think I might have to bite the bullet on a couple of 1gb DIMM's. Oh well.

I've also noticed increasing memory usage.

At some points, after a couple teleports, the client consumes around 800mb of memory (out of 1gig of DDR RAM on this PC). At which point I have to restart the client to regain performance.

I'll log in and stand in place without moving, and after the environment completely loads up, the memory usage continues to tick upward progressively and constantly without stopping.

* OS: Win XP Pro, SP 2, Build 2600
* Graphics Card: nVidia Geforce 7600GS
* Graphics Card Driver: ForceWare Release 90, Ver. 93.71
* CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
* Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4
* RAM: Dual Channel CORSAIR XMS2 1GB (2 x 512MB) DDR2 800

(thankfully a second set of dual channel 512mb RAM chips are on the way as I type this)

i would say it is, the sl designers do very little to reduce the texture amount they use, as a result its the end user that get the short end of the stick

If you've got the RAM, is there any reason not to allocate all of it to SL? The more textures and the like that it keeps in RAM, the better your performance is likely to be. I've got 2GB and I'm pondering making half of that a RAMdisk for the cache.

Well, some of us multitask, and the more RAM the SL client consumes, the more likely hard drive pagefile swapping will occur in order to run other programs, resulting in a significant performance hit.

Beyond that, for some of us at least, there seems to be a significant memory leak, in which case, more RAM or more 'allocation' merely delays the inevitable pagefile issue.

I'm not technically savvy when it comes to SL memory usage or how textures are offloaded from active memory. However, anecdotally it appears as if perhaps old no-longer visible textures are remaining in memory without being dumped to cache.

When I'm around 3-5 avatars in a walled-in environment (with only 65m draw distance), I don't expect the client to need to horde 600-800 megs of RAM. My laymen's mind considers that to be ridiculous.

When I teleport from one place to another, I expect the data from where I was previously to no longer need to remain in active memory. Anecdotally, the client's memory usage seems to demonstrate that it's keeping that old data in memory and piling it on as I move around. Thus the eventual need for me to exit the client every so often.

I've gone so far as to experimentally force (using Memory Mechanic which comes with System Mechanic 6) some of the data in memory to the pagefile, and upon maximizing SL, the usage quickly creeps up to the former size as soon as it can finish pulling the data from cache.

Hopefully, someone (preferrably a Linden) can shed light on how SL uses memory. If I'm way off base with my guesses, by all means, folks, please enlighten me/us.

SL leaks memory all over the place. A brief glance at the client code turns up a number of places that do this. As leaks represent more than 50% of the defects in C/C++ code and are typically hard work to fix, I don't expect this will change anytime soon. Indeed, I hope that it doesn't as a bad fix for a leak will break things badly thus making crashes more frequent instead of just losing memory.

Even in a product made by those more professional than LL (e.g. WoW) there are leaks that can be on the order of 0.5KB/sec. SL is far, far worse than this.

I have 4 GB of RAM. Are there any tweaks I can do to increase FPS as far as the secondlife.exe process itself? I'm not referring to making graphic detail changes inside SL.

LOL Thili. That just cracked me up.. I"ll bet it was a *tad* bit sluggish lol.

If I am understanding the client code correctly, Windows XP appears to be loading the entire cache into memory when the client starts up. So if you have 1 gig of memory and 1 gig of cache... whoops there went the memory.

llstartup.cpp

	// Poke the VFS, which could potentially block
	// for a while if Windows XP is acting up
	set_startup_status(0.05f, "Verifying cache files (can take 60-90 seconds)...", NULL);
	display_startup();

	gVFS->pokeFiles();

llvfs.h

	// Used to trigger evil WinXP behavior of 
	// "preloading" entire file into memory.
	void pokeFiles();

llvfs.cpp

void LLVFS::pokeFiles()
{
	if (!isValid())
	{
		llerrs << "Attempting to use invalid VFS!" << llendl;
	}
	U32 word;
	
	// only write data if we actually read 4 bytes
	// otherwise we're writing garbage and screwing up the file
	fseek(mDataFP, 0, SEEK_SET);
	if (fread(&word, 1, 4, mDataFP) == 4)
	{
		fseek(mDataFP, 0, SEEK_SET);
		fwrite(&word, 1, 4, mDataFP);
		fflush(mDataFP);
	}

	fseek(mIndexFP, 0, SEEK_SET);
	if (fread(&word, 1, 4, mIndexFP) == 4)
	{
		fseek(mIndexFP, 0, SEEK_SET);
		fwrite(&word, 1, 4, mIndexFP);
		fflush(mIndexFP);
	}
}