A Huge Memory Hog and too Processor Intensive

What is up with this program's enormous appetite for memory ? It is insatiable. I get into a sim - and within an hour - watch this behemoth climb from 250 megs to over a gigabyte -- and continue to climb !

I've played, and hosted, some intense games online before. I've run some rather processor intensive programs before - but this one really takes the cake. It is very similiar to watching what we used to call a memory leak in beta testing some of the games.

I just find it hard to believe that this 'game' should require over a gig of RAM and 50 percent of an FX-60's processing power.

ugh most nearly all of that is textures. Most all games have a limited amount of textures used and what is used is reused throughout the game. Have you ever looked at your own bandwidth meter while in game. You can hit 450 kbps easily. THat is a great deal of data coming in. ANd yes that works out to over a gig and hour.

THere is one nice little cheat that helps a little. Edit your shortcut and put at the end " -purge" That is with a space before the minus sign. That will automatically clean your cache everytime you start the game.

All 3D games try to eat as much cpu power as they can, it is by design.

I'll try the purge idea. I have 2 graphics cards running SLI - an additional 512 megs of RAM. Keeping textures that are no longer used - seems like a flaw in the programming.

I am talking about staying in the same sim. The only textures coming and going are the peeps. If they are not around (leave the SIM), then their textures' memory slots should be purged/overwritten by a new peep entering the sim.

Baaah on the games using as much processing power as possible. I've NEVER seen BF2 or JO take this much to run a game once it was up and running...EVER. I find the texture build-up a plausible explanation of the memory consumption. I'm not buying that this game needs this much processing power to run. The need for the intensive processing power could make one believe that the Linden Servers are only serving the consumer with instructions to run the SIMS themselves - along with giving the permissions on a given SIM.

There is something wrong with this program.. not sure what.. but there is.

I forget what the exact equation is, but the amount of system RAM that SL uses is related to the amount of video RAM that you have.

I want to say that SL system RAM = 2.5 * video RAM, but I'm not sure if that's right.

So, if you have lots of video RAM it will eat an impressive amount of system RAM.

You can however change how much video RAM SL uses in the preferences. Sounds like you might want to reduce it there.

They are only serving instructions, aren't they?

Just lines of numbers for each prim that our client then needs to assemble into graphical form.

Running one instance of SL I see CPU usage of 50 percent, since it's a dual core processor.

With two instances the figures drop to 45 for each instance.

With two SL's and one Preview I see CPU usage of 40 and 26 for the SLs and and 20 for the preview.

SL uses available CPU power - but relinquishes it to other applications as needed.

look closer then, any game try to use as much processing power as it can, wich mean on a single thread game like SL , 100% of a single core processor, or 50% on a dual core

Purging the disk cache isn't going to make a bit of difference to main memory or GPU memory use. And SL doesn't keep textures around when they're not being used, but they don't have any way of knowing when a texture isn't being used... except when it hasn't been used for a while.

They are... but not immediately. Also, depending on where you are and what your graphics settings are, you can conceivably have 20 sims in view at once, and typically... unless you're absolutely centered in the sim with your draw distance set to the default 128 meters or lower... you have 2-4 sims in view all the time.

It really does. The ability to build in-world dynamically means that almost all the optimizations that other games use to cut down on processing simply aren't possible for SL.

There are meny things wrong with the program, and I can go into quite a lot of detail about them if you like, but this isn't one of them.

With the exception of builds created only using the Library textures, or possibly builds created using the same obtained-in-world texture sets, everybody's SL builds use their own texture sets.

If I'm somewhere surrounded by lots of very "busy" little builds, there's many more textures in play than would ever be found in a regular game. None of the usual pre-vis computation can be done, because anyone can "change the world" at any time, so at least everything within your draw distance has to be loaded.

Awesome answers.. thanks for the explanations.