Spiral Knights - Restarting java process every hour = issue

Restarting java process every hour = issue

15 replies [Last post]

Tue, 12/13/2011 - 14:52

No-Thanks

so after every hour or 2, i have to restart sk client to get rid of some weird system hang ups. its never been an issue to me, but now that i play lockdown only, its getting more and more annoying.

1 it kicks me from the game
2 it DELAYS the lockdown matches multiple times
3 worst of all, the nice match with the nice teams for which i restart java goes poof and i end up in an overkill or overfail team after having gone through a kick in my butt and a not so nice waiting time

i dont know what causes it, but itd be great if it could be bypassed somehow, so the player doesnt suffer from it

there were some posts about that issue in the forums, but i fail to comprehend them

Wed, 12/14/2011 - 02:29

Silphius

First: I have no idea what

First: I have no idea what your actual problem is. Be concise, be clear. What does a "system hang up" look like?

Second: This should be in technical support.

How do technical issues affect lockdown match delays? Those are present on the best computers since that's how lockdown queuing works. What does your third point even mean? Teams are random, yes. Every new game is a random coin-flip if you end up in the good team or the underdog team.

"there were some posts about that issue in the forums"
List one of the posts about that issue instead of just referencing them, without a link that comment is useless.

Now what you can actually try:

1: Did you follow advice from this thread? If so, delete the extra.txt file from your spiral knights directory to reset it back to the old situation (the tweaks mentioned there are supposedly unnecessary since a recent patch)

2: Did you try reinstalling? Follow this guy's advice for the proper procedure:
- Uninstall the game.
- Go to your Spiral Knights folder
- delete the /rsrc/ folder (or everything like that poster did)
- Install Spiral knights again.

Wed, 12/14/2011 - 05:23

Lufte

Read the first thread

Read the first thread Silphius pointed you to and try the extra.txt file with these options:

-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:+CMSIncrementalMode
-XX:+CMSIncrementalPacing
-XX:+ExplicitGCInvokesConcurrent

Wed, 12/14/2011 - 07:07

Silphius

Let him try the first two

Let him try the first two options first, changing garbage collection and whatnot might be a good idea when we determine the vanilla setup functions correctly (or not).

Wed, 12/14/2011 - 10:13

Evilduck

@Silphius When he says

@Silphius When he says delays, he's talking about how clicking "play again" puts you in with (nearly) the same people over and over again whereas leaving and signing up again (which he is forced to do by reclienting) makes him wait several minutes before putting him in with new people where the teams are unbalanced.

And I believe what he's talking about is the "memory leak". If you're on windows you can use ctrl+alt+delete to bring up your processes and you'll see that the value under Memory (Private Working Set) for the javaw.exe process grows steadily over time (or extremely quickly if you're in certain places, especially UIMF). The performance tweaks mentioned in the first thread you linked don't solve that at all (I know because I've applied all those tweaks) and nor does reinstalling. I'm pretty sure it's a coding thing and everyone should have the same issue - it'll just be more of an issue for those of us whose systems are sub par.

@No-Thanks There's one thing you can do to help this a little: don't log off and get a new client. Click "play again" when you finish a match and use your task manager to end the javaw.exe process straight away, then open a new client and log back in. Unless your system is abysmal, you'll be able to log back in before you get put into another map (you don't need to load up before the timer runs out, you just need to have reconnected to the server) so you'll stay with the same people.

Thu, 12/15/2011 - 05:31

No-Thanks

Zelda

"system hang up":
after 1-2 hours of fluent gameplay, it looks like lag, a sudden fps drop, which even affects that connection display thingy in top right corner of screen(white, orange, red bars jump to red bar during that hang up). i only experienced something similar once on firefox plugin container after having watched alot of movies. google research lead me to believe, that it has something to do with context switches along with their growth(cswitch delta in process explorer), but since that is too difficult to understand for me, i just took the possible solution (of restarting the process) for such a problem out of the google research and applied it to sk and plugin container, which worked fine up untill i started spamming lockdown.

however, SK is the 1st game, that i experience with such a flaw

"there were some posts about that issue in the forums":
http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/23031

#2
ill try it next time i feel like playing hours of lockdown..just curious why the developers dont put it in eventually with an on- off switch, if it really does solve the issue in some or all cases

#4
im glad at least u seem to understand the issue and provide me with ur own experiences. i tend to restart after clicking play again, but sometimes i fail to predict when the system hang ups are about to get nasty while i never know when i could be the lucky guy in 1 of the funnest lockdown teams, that im given by the random system..so i thot eventually the developers could simulate something similar to a restarting of the process(it cant be that much of an issue, can it?)

and since u mentioned memory leak..sometimes i run ccleaner as well after closing the process and it always removes around 0.4-1MB. i have the feeling, that sk leaves those files there(i think in temp folders)

just curious, if that could have to do with swap files. i never suspected it, because i have 3 gigs of RAM, which seem very sufficient to me. if i try to do more of a research about swap files and memory leak, i just get confused again with alot more information than what im actually interested in, so im just putting the raw info here, hopefully read by whoever can do something beneficial with it

Thu, 12/15/2011 - 03:12

Silphius

@Evilduck

Thanks for the explanation, his problem wasn't clear to me. Please note though, that I was merely confirming he was working with an unmodified setup, nowhere in my text did I suggest he start implementing the fixes. In fact I tried to make sure none were applied in the first place so we start with a clean slate.

My next step would have been:
1 - asking what OS he is using. It appears in his most recent post he's using Windows. CCleaner does have a Mac version though.
2 - Ask him how much RAM he has. 3 Gb apparently, which is not bad at all.
3 - Ask him how much RAM is in use by the rest of his system when he starts playing SK. (Would like an answer on this, No-Thanks)
4 - Ask him how much RAM SK is using at the time he has to restart it, also as a percentage of his total available. (Would like an answer on this, No-Thanks)

I'm aware of the memory leak occurrence, yet that has been previously been established as a garbage collection issue. Since he has 3 Gb RAM he should be fine. I had this exact issue, yet certain settings in the first thread I mentioned solved that which were later made obsolete when a recent patch adjusted the heap size, with sufficient RAM available garbage collection should not kick in and cause "hang-ups". The max I've reached was just short of 1 GB RAM in use after 5+ hours of play.

Since we established he didn't already create an extra.txt file and change Garbage collection settings, has sufficient RAM (if he answers #3), know what OS he has (to you know, point him to a correct directory path for the extra.txt to go in) we can start fiddling with settings. If Lufte's settings don't work we can try checking Hard-disk bottleneck, maybe swap-file settings. I don't expect these to be the cause, default Swap file settings under windows Vista and up are robust enough to not become a hinderance when decent amounts of RAM are available.

Thu, 12/15/2011 - 05:31

No-Thanks

Zelda

1 win xp sp3(with steam)
2 its 4gb but the OS is limited to 3gb or so
3 process explorer says for physical memory(k), total:3.407.080 ; available:2.45x.xxx(-2.55x.xxx seems to be varying alot, so im not sure about it) ; system cache:700.xxx
4 ill check next time playing sk alot(should be within a week)

ty for being so willing to help \o/

Thu, 12/15/2011 - 07:38

Silphius

Sure, I'll keep this topic

Sure, I'll keep this topic bookmarked.

Fri, 12/16/2011 - 13:09

Starlinvf

Do you use the In-game voice

Do you use the In-game voice or have it disabled? The game can only encounter a memory leak on 2 specific maps, and in both cases it doesn't cause the connection meter to fluctuate like that. If I had to wager a guess, it does sound like CPU starvation or an IO backlog like Silphius is hinting at.

Sat, 12/17/2011 - 13:41

#10

No-Thanks

Zelda

i usually have steam voice chat off

steam is up, 1.1-1.2gb total ram in use

1.3gb in use when client is up
while waiting for lockdown delays it went from 1.4gb to 1.5gb(java process using 400mb ram now :o)

joined lockdown 1, 1.6gb in use(485 from java)

1LD match done almost 500mb ram in use by java

java slowly grew to 600mb ram usage

doesnt seem to be growing much 600mb/3400mb=18%

starting to feel some lag, but ram usage doesnt seem to be growing much above 600mb, just jumps to 700mb at loading screen

i wouldnt mind a restart now, a little bit lag in battle but the hp load up in beginning starting to lag badly and jumps to red connect(that why i dont move in respawn untill hp fully recovered), 627mb ram use byjava

lag getting worse stil 600mb

gona restart now just take the 18%

Sat, 12/17/2011 - 17:39

#11

Silphius

Note: When you try a

Note: When you try a suggested fix, test one before moving on to the next.

Do you use steam or do you use a standalone client? Is java up to date? http://java.com/en/download/testjava.jsp
My first suggestion would be to update Java (not necessary with steam). Try this first (unless you have steam) and retest.

Secondly I'd suggest setting a huge heapsize to eliminate garbage collection issues, I'm not comfortable excluding those since you say problems arise at the 600mb point exactly. Follow Lufte's directions (the details are on page 3) but instead of those -XX commands simply enter a single line:
-Xmx1g

Did you read this topic? http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/48
That topic contains a few further suggestions after you try these first two.

Lastly, could you describe how your lag looks? Does the game freeze for a bit? Does your computer make a lot of sound? (I'm not suspecting an overheating issue, but doesn't hurt to ask).

Mon, 01/02/2012 - 11:49

#12

No-Thanks

Zelda

i use steam but i updated java regardless, because it turned out to be outdated. updating java didnt solve the issue

the extra.txt file with -Xmx1g didnt solve the issue

it seems to me that the issue is somehow tightly connected to my amount of maximum HP. ive played without ancient plate set and health trinkets for a few days now and i could fluently play for many hours at a stretch in lockdown/clockworks without restarting java.

what kind of causes are most probably connected with fps drop during the healing procedure of bigger amounts of HP, that occurs after 1-2 hours? im asking that because i like having much health

Mon, 01/02/2012 - 14:24

#13

Asukalan

Do you also monitor your CPU

Do you also monitor your CPU usage? I have sympoms similar to your when my CPU usage is going near 100%.

Mon, 01/02/2012 - 14:40

#14

No-Thanks

Zelda

CPU usage for javaw.exe usually doesnt go far over 50%, so system idle process pretty much always has 20% at least altho i havent checked it at the same time when my fps drops becuz i play in full screen

Mon, 01/02/2012 - 15:01

#15

Asukalan

I have this when i play and

I have this when i play and another app starts to eat up CPU time. Its usually anty vir (java takes 50% and AV takes about 50% too ><). It either starts a scanning (some background stuff) or starts to update itself. At the very moment the game starts to be completly unplayable. The moment i terminate scanning or update, or even shut down AV and open it again (to interrupt background task) it goes back to normal.

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Restarting java process every hour = issue