Memory Handing

Sometimes, especialy after visiting a mall or two, funny things start to happen.

1) Low fps, freezes, and even crashes.
2) Memory usage listed by windows: About 500mb or so.
3) SL chews up my hard drive so bad my entire computer freezes up for a long time, and I usually ctrl-alt-del to kill the SL process, hardcore style.

So... with 2gb of ram, why is SL using only 500 and chewing up my hard-drive, swapping? I have so far chalked it up to shoddy programming when it comes to memory-handling. Is there any way to get around these problems? If not, is this actually something LL are at all concerned about?

Emi

Same thing here, though I never seemed to have this problem until a few updates ago. I'll be going along fine and suddenly when I try to turn around or pan my camera everything will come to a complete stop while SL assaults my hard drive. It's gotten to be extremely frustrating.
About the only thing that seems to help is setting my draw distance to 32 in the debug settings. But I shouldn't have to do that considering my video card alone has 512MB of memory!
I've also never seen a program so completely bad at releasing memory. Usually when I quit the client interface will disappear but the HD keeps reading and reading and SecondLife.exe is still in memory. I can watch as it slowly releases memory. What the heck.
This has got to be one of the Top Issues for me currently. Lag is to be expected, but this memory handling issues has got to be looked into.

Are you sure it's swapping?

What's your SL cache size set to and how much free space do you have on the drive that holds it? Also, without SL running, how much memory does it show in use?

Yes, I have this issue, and so do many others. Nicholaz Beresford has been investigating this issue for quite a while, and tried many fixes in his version of the client to solve the issue, but so far without success. You can visit his blog at http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/ if you search back a few months you can read more than you ever care to know about it.

I was able to stop the memory leak (SL viewer image growing to infinity) by turning off Object-Object occlusion. It's under Client->Rendering.

Watching the viewer using Windows Task Manager, I can see the Mem Usage and VM Size grow until I turn it off, stay level for as long as I stand there and then start climbing when I turn it back on again.

That's interesting, I'm at work at the moment so can't check, but can other users please test and see if they experience the same thing (turning off object - object occlusion stops the memory leak).

If so then Misterblue, you may have identified a big memory leak, if others experience it too then it needs put on the JIRA so it can get fixed

I already added a comment to VWR-2997 ("Second Life Client Severe Memory Leak Problems and Repeated Crashing - SL Use Now Becoming Impossible/Unbearable" which seems to be the one collecting memory leak horror stories.
And I too hope that this can lead a debugger to find the problem. It's been a crashing pain for months.

Just a quick response: I have enough HD space free and, yes, I have sufficiently large cache size. And am I sure it's swapping? NO idea. I never looked at LL's code, becuase quite frankly I'm afraid to. I assume it's swapping. Why else would SL suddenly decide to chew HD? Makes absolutely no sense.

And nice to hear it's a known issue. I'll assume that LL are doing little to nothing about it, as usual.

Nicholaz has succeeded in plugging enough memory leaks to make it worthwhile to try his client for that alone. If you're plagued by excessive swapping, try his client. I have 768MB of RAM and integrated Intel graphics, and can go for hours without seeing swap freeze.

All of his fixes have been submitted to LL, but not all have made it thru the release pipeline, I believe.

If the Intel graphics don't crash me first!

The turning off "Object-object occlusion" fixes memory leaking in both the RC and in Nicholaz-BE-s. Nicolaz's viewer is the only one I regularly use -- it is much better tuned than the one from LL and it doesn't have the new, screen real estate stealing communication dialog. I highly recommend it to everyone.

I wouldn't' be surprised if this memory leak was some funny interaction with the NVidia graphics drivers or one of the million graphics parameters therein. I'm sure this is not the only leak or cause of crashes.

For this particular problem, Windows users should try opening task manager and looking for the viewer under the "Processes" tab. With Nicholaz's viewer, I normally run betweek 300K and 400K "Mem Usage". If you see that climbing to 500K and above, you might have this leak problem (or you're using the LL viewer which doesn't seem to handle the in memory cache as well).

And I do wish Intel would get their graphics driver act together, but that's a totally different subject.

I'll have to give this a try. This issue has been a problem i've had for quite some time.

Misterblue, does this make rezzing a new place very slow? Or do you have a monster machine and it doesn't matter for you?

As I understand it, this option (when on) makes SL not render objects that are behind opaque objects. See http://secondlife.com/app/help/new/culling.php

So, if it's off, my machine has to render everthing, yes?

I'll try it anyway, just wanted to know what to expect

i'd have to concur that (from an old mac, pre-intel that the client seems more 'grabby' with my hard drive. i always set the disk cache up to 1000 MBs off the bat, but it sure is acting more like a 500 sized cache anymore (a lot more static-y and jumpy loading up 'new' uncached locations than before)....

With "Object-Object Occlusion" switched off I'm finding my hard-drive thrashing a lot less, which is interesting.


Unfortunately yes, however for some reason (as already noted) it starts eating up memory, which in my case leads to a lot of hard-drive access and thus very poor performance. Turning it off I get maybe 2 or 3 less frames-per-second (a shame, as Occlusion Culling used to give me a good 10-15 fps extra, it's definitely got worse!) but the game seems smoother again.

It doesn't make entering a new place overly slow for me, but definitely slower as more needs to be downloaded. However SL tends to download things nearer to you first so you should still get enough to start exploring. OC still requires things to be downloaded, but helps prioritise based on what you can actually see.