Spiral Knights - OT: Java and memory leaks

OT: Java and memory leaks

11 replies [Last post]

Fri, 11/19/2010 - 22:22

BehindCurtai

Legacy Username

Just how immune to memory leaks are Java programs in reality?

After playing a few levels, the SK client gets huge. I can reduce the memory footprint significantly by force quit and restart. Yet with no memory leaks, that's not supposed to happen, right?

From what I understand, you aren't supposed to need to null out pointers to free stuff in Java; it's supposed to automatically detect not only allocated memory that has been nulled and dereferenced, but also blocks that are still pointed to when that pointer is dead.

Yet ... the SK client just gets bigger and bigger as I go deeper.

Sun, 11/21/2010 - 06:29

Kaybol

Legacy Username

Java is not immune to memory

Java is not immune to memory leaks. Can't give ya a number on any scale though.

Sun, 11/21/2010 - 06:52

Evolution

Legacy Username

Perhaps manually letting SK

Perhaps manually letting SK delete old entries and etc every time you enter an elevator and load a new level can help? I've noticed as well yesterday that at taskmanager the memory used by SK went up from 320MB to 370MB after a few levels.

Sun, 11/21/2010 - 08:47

Kharnor

Legacy Username

I usually have to restart my

I usually have to restart my client after each run if i want to do another. If i'm with a full party, it gets bad enough that I sometimes try to disconnect, restart my client, and reconnect halfway through the run to prevent my computer slowing down.

Sun, 11/21/2010 - 12:33

kojiden

Legacy Username

One time my memory usages on

One time my memory usages on Spiral Knights was at 480k.

Sun, 11/21/2010 - 21:57

Dogrock

Spiral Knights has cracked

Spiral Knights has cracked the half-gig barrier for me on my desktop. Though to be honest, it's usually faster since *everything* ends up in the RAM, no pagefile here! On my lappy it rarely passes 350MB, so I do think the client size is relative to the amount of physical memory and page/swap file available. For the record the desktop has 6GB RAM useable and the lappy has 4GB with 256MB bite out of it for the graphics, minimum pagefile on both (16MB)

Also, that's peanuts compared to NFS: Hot Pursuit (1GB), Fallout: NV (1.5GB), or Civ V (2GB+). Especially when most people play a game on a computer they generally aren't multitasking.

Mon, 11/22/2010 - 01:43

Evolution

Legacy Username

I multi-task all the time

I multi-task all the time when playing a computer game :p that's why I hate games without windowed mode

Mon, 11/22/2010 - 02:06

Xcali19

Legacy Username

i can actually understand

Heh is looks like my Computer science class is paying off because i can actually understand what u guys are saying, anyway.. to me it just seems like bad optimization.

There should be a method that continuously gets rid of junk memory or a option to only load what is a couple of feet ahead of you. I hardly think i need data from that monster killed in the first map.
GuildWars is great at doing this.

Mon, 11/22/2010 - 12:07

BehindCurtai

Legacy Username

I cannot help but

I cannot help but multitask.
My OS is a unix derivative.

===

Normally, I have my system set up to run without active swapping. I have a pair of watchdog scripts that keep track of system memory availability, and flush out excess caches occasionally, plus turning swapping on when the system gets low on memory.

The biggest problem was just tracking down how to track the Time Machine backups -- once that was solved, my system normally never needs to swap -- ever -- unless I'm running three firefox profiles. Compiling doesn't do it, editing files with TextEdit is nothing (but Google Docs adds almost 100 MB to Firefox), even YPP doesn't cause swapping with three clients open doing shop management.

With nothing more than Terminal, Finder, Dock, Activity Monitor, TextEdit, and Spiral Knights, I wind up swapping. Of course, it doesn't start swapping until I've gone through 3-5 levels -- and that's what makes me think that there's some sort of memory leak, despite Java's garbage collection.

(I can run around the three scenes of Haven back and forth, and the memory usage stays constant. I go down in a dungeon, and memory goes up.)

EDIT:
> I usually have to restart my client after each run if i want to do another. If i'm with a full party, it gets bad enough that I sometimes try to disconnect, restart my client, and reconnect halfway through the run to prevent my computer slowing down.

I'm trying to remember to do this on the level loading screens every three levels.

Tue, 11/23/2010 - 09:02

Fnord

Legacy Username

Increasing memory consumption

Increasing memory consumption is not necessarily a sign of a memory leak. It seems far more likely that the increased memory usage is completely intentional, as more and more graphic elements are cached during runs instead of loading everything you could potentially see right when the game starts.

Wed, 11/24/2010 - 13:27

#10

Burninat0r

Legacy Username

I've had SK using up to 1.5

I've had SK using up to 1.5 GB of memory on my Mac OS system with 4 GB of memory.

Of course, this used to happen all the time with YPP as well.

Wed, 11/24/2010 - 13:39

#11

Dogrock

Side Plug

The Guys at Tom's Hardware did an interesting analysis of adding extra memory to a system and its prformance effects. This page sheds some light on systems memory relating to graphics cards. Of course this is only examined from the Windows perspective of things.

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OT: Java and memory leaks