#3142 Possible Memory Leak?

[Skye_Wyven]

Name: Possible Memory Leak?

Description: Today was the first day playing v.282 of The Long Dark, I think the last time I played was v.271. I spent nearly 6 hours in the game and by the end it suddenly started lagging severely. I had nearly nothing else open or running on my computer at the time but I found that shutting down my web browser and force-quitting my virus checker was the only way to get the game to respond at all in the end. I checked what the Task Manager said about it and it told me the game was using over 1,900 MB of memory.

When I finally managed to quit the game I re-started it to check what the starting memory is and found it at just over 470 MB. Unfortunately, due to this restart I don't have a debug file (I completely forgot about that, sorry).

I'm not that knowledgeable about computers but this seems to me as though there's a memory leak somewhere, maybe?

I should probably also note that this was also the first time playing the game on this particular computer, however the previous times were all on a laptop with vastly reduced capabilities compared to this computer and also on previous versions of the game and with no issues.

OS: Windows 8 Pro, other system details in my signature.

Repro steps: I can only assume that playing for several hours will yield the same result, unfortunately I don't really have such time to test this theory.

[elloco999]

I'm no expert either, but it seems logical that the memory usage after 6 hours of gaming would be higher than after just starting the game. As assets get loaded the memory usage increases.

Unloading stuff from memory is often done automatically but only when needed. Given the 32GB RAM in your system there is no reason to free up memory by unloading stuff that isn't being used at the moment but doing so would require reloading them if they are needed later. So they remain in memory until the space they take up in the RAM is needed.

If there was a memory leak, people who play on lesser machine (and that would be just about everyone I would think) would experience problems much sooner than after 6 hours. My previous system had only 4GB, a much older CPU with 4 cores and an older/ slower GPU and that ran TLD for 4-5 hours without problems on several occations.

That said, I have no idea what else could be causing such lag.

[Guest Support]

Thanks for the report, I've entered it for the team to look at.