Those Memory-Hole Blues

Ok, what the hell is this...

Dell Precision 470: 2 x 3.2 Xeons. 1Gb RAM. XP Pro Sp2 with all patches. AVG anti-virus, lots of storage including a separate drive for the SL (and other) caches. NVidia 7800GTX with 256MB of RAM; 24 inch flat panel at 1900 by 1200; sl in a 1200-by-1200 ish window.

SL just munches memory like crazy. Starts off with a couple of hundred meg; after about 40-50 minutes it's over 1Gb and the machine swaps like a wild thing. I'm forced to log out; even then with SL shut down and the entry gone from the task bar, the process hammers on: with the last run I went straight back to the sim I'd just left and it took no more than ten minutes to get up over 800MB of RAM used in task manager: and this time when I logged out, Secondlife.exe stayed in the task list, with no visible window, and 90 meg of RAM associated with it. Had to hard-reboot the machine to get things back to normal.

Any ideas? Is it an Nvidia driver problem? Other machines here don't show this behaviour - indeed, the rule seems to be that the cheaper and older-generation the card, the better it runs. Some of the memory leak seems to be associated with which sims one goes to - could it be a cache thing or a texture memory problem?

I'm not entirely sure it's a problem with SL. Yes, SL is one memory hungry program and appears to have a rather large memory leak. Windows has a history of not being very good at memory management.........getting better but it's still pretty sloppy.

I don't crash because of RAM running out..........I only have 1 gig. My RAM runs right at 600 megs consistantly. It varies a little but never gets close to the 1 gig. My dual core P4 runs right at 50% consistantly too (without assigning a single core). I run XP Home with SP2 completely updated. My thoughts are that you may have quite a bit of background programs running. I have a software firewall, anti virus, and anti spyware running. That's pretty much it for back ground stuff.

I find, too, that when I shut down SL it takes a long time to launch any other program until
Windows releases that RAM. It has taken up to an hour to get back to my normal speed. But, that's Windows...........not SL. The GIMP does the same thing to me.

With 512 view distance and 42 avatars in sim, i still cant use more then 825mb ram even with map open, wich sim do you hang out in -.o , only way i ever get 1200+ ram use is on 70+ avatars 'ish sims

Only when i hit about 1800+ram use (doesnt ever happen anymore really) i have to restart SL cause its choppy then.

Any of the 2gig/4gig pc's behave like this for me (i have 5 -.-)

Oh, let's not start on portfolios of PCs ... !

Looking around yesterday, it DOES seem to depend on WHERE YOU GO in SL. Places with lots of uploaded graphic panels or larger textures, or animated objects like disco lights, hammer the RAM allocation through the roof. Places with fairly simple smooth colour-panelled prims will bring the RAM allocaiton back down again.

I left Task Manager running while I ran around places in SL and watched both the processor slice, and other processes running: there's precious little else happening and only SL shows as having any percentage of the processors - steady at 25%, no matter what I do. By going to a "graphics busy" location and then coming back home again I managed to get some memory reclaim but it took several tens of minutes to happen; by contrast, the ATi machine in the basement that runs Vista 64-bit will run all day and not kill the RAM.

Looks like it's time to bring up one of the single processor 3.4's with hardware RAID5 and an ATi, and go through all that strife moving the apps from machine to machine, again!

Look here on 'memory leaks' /111/9d/183546/1.html