Why is POE RAM usage constantly grows while playing?

It is so weird cause with time you run out of RAM :D So How much RAM does this game needs - 16gb? I just checked system requirements and it says 2gb minimum. I have VERY VERY big doubts you would be able to even run it with that.

I've heard that it is because of DX11. Although, for example when I run D3 I run it in DX11 too but, I've never seen D3 client behaving like that with RAM. Never noticed that with other games too o_0.

With POE I have to restart the game every 20-30 minutes to refresh RAM usage.

PS. Im using SSD, have a pretty ok connection 100mbps and use 8GB RAM. (if that is of any help)

Might be a memory leak and I have also noticed that there is some extra RAM usage. It's happened before in previous leagues/patches. A few months ago it fried a motherboard RAM slot. Lucky I still had other RAM slots to use. Also have 8GB of RAM.


Edit: Also just tested. There is definitely a memory leak. Was online for a few hours and POE RAM usage was sitting at 4.5GB. Restarted the game and it's back down to 2.2GB.

So how do I fix a memory leak or how do I even see that it is or isn't a memory leak? I heard of such term but have no clue how to check upon that.

"

y3lw0rC a écrit :

So how do I fix a memory leak or how do I even see that it is or isn't a memory leak? I heard of such term but have no clue how to check upon that.

Nothing we can do. GGG has to fix their code. They usually will mention it in the patch notes if they do.

Oh my...

I remember in the early days I had no problems with POE and RAM and whatever.

With every expansion the performance gets worse and worse and more problems arise. In fact, I don't really recall GGG doing anything related to RAM problems. And it seems that a lot of people are having similar problems (I've googled it).

I really don't get why they choose to add more stuff that cause problems instead of optimizing it first and then add. Well, fingers crossed that they gonna do something soon regarding those RAM. Because I think that this only started to happen when they added DX11... And thats quite a long time ago...

>>>Well, programs are supposed to free that memory storage from time to time. PoE just does not do that properly (but its getting better)<<< (was said on poe reddit)

So yeah, if POE doesn't free up unused RAM from time to time (if it is really possible) no wonder that eventually it leads to a crash or a restart or even fried hardware :(

Such a good game but the engine and optimization is their Achilles heel for quite a long time now. One day it might yield very bad results.

1. It cannot "fry" your RAM-slot. If it got fried - that's because it was to got fried sooner or later.

2. I think PoE loads all cosmetics you see in town to memory, but don't outload it later. Actually it is OK to do so while there is a lot of free RAM - a lot of software only free RAM on need.

Have you tried manually forcing/tweaking the garbage-collection?

Launching the game with the "-GC" parameter lets you choose how frequently you want the garbage-collector to clean-out unneeded assets from RAM. The lower you set this ("-GC 1") the more frequently garbage collection occurs meaning RAM is cleaned-out more often. The downside of that is that any assets you remove from memory need to be reloaded the next time they're needed so if you set the value very low you could end up increasing load-times as a trade-off.

Nontheless, each time the garbage-collector is run, RAM usage should decrease again. I can run the game for several hours and not notice any significant increase in the amount of RAM used, so I imagine it could be because I am using "-GC 2".

If you're not forcing the garbage collection this way, there could be a bug where it doesn't end-up running, or it could default to trying to keep too many generations of assets in memory at once hence why RAM use increases over time.

Working as a software developer, I just wanted to chime in that it might technically not be a leak, however practically, it needs to be adressed.

-> the game asset file as a whole is large enough for a possibility that anything that gets actually loaded to memory on the fly stays there, is never released again, the pointer/reference to that data still exists and is valid (~therefore technically not a memory leak). We usually call it "never let go AKA DiCaprio" approach internally.

-> there are many techniques of when to "let asset go", either based on time, size, usage frequency or reuse probablity heuristic. We can only guess, which one GGG uses, but steady RAM usage increase might not necessarily mean memory leak is involved (although that would be a natural suspect).

In real world, you usually need to establish "how much RAM I can eat up" and then implement your allocation strategy accordingly. Sometimes, it is even beneficial to let users decide (~speed vs. lightweight memory arena size "slider")

And it still might be, that the decided strategy was "don't let go as long as possible" to potentially improve performance at a cost of memory consumption.

Overall, a decent, well behaved software should not crash over time, which is nearly impossible to achieve with strict "diCaprio" approach. I assume there is some kind of allocator strategy in place. But looking from the outside, hard to determine (~example - if you would just run the game, hanging in the menu and game RAM size would steadily increase, that can still mean there is some very aggressive asset preload heuristic or a leak, but not which at a glance)

"

aldorus a écrit :

Working as a software developer, I just wanted to chime in that it might technically not be a leak, however practically, it needs to be adressed.
....

Yepp that a a program uses more and more memory the longer it run isn't sure it's a leak, probably that it caches more and more stuff and doesn't unload it since there are free memory to be used.
This isn't usually a problem since most memory handling functions handle low memory scenarios.


Anyway, one issue Ive ran into a couple of month ago with POE was about the same as you mention... more and more memory used and after a while hanging and/or crashing...
Turned out that I didn't have any swap enabled at all... (no idea why...)
After fixing that all the problems went away..