Memory leak question

[Q]

I finally got the memory leak crash:

After only 3 turns in an advanced BM 1.05 game with 14 AI empires (usual complete turn processing time 5-10 minutes) at stardate around 2415.0.

Now the question how to avoid best this game crash:

Is it better to make a fixed virtual memory size (how much?) or to let the system (Windows XP) handle the size?

Thank you for your answer.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Virtual memory should always be fixed. And as for size, it seems 2.5x your ram is reccomended.

* Note: It's been about a year since I last checked on that.

[Demorve]

I don't know how many people have tracked this, but this is my observation. I have dual monitors and I recently upgraded my cpu to a dual core. Since I have done this I run the Windows Task Manager in one monitor and play the game in the other just to see how the program is using the dual cores. Here's what I noticed about SEV on my machine. The page file usage increases around 125 meg per turn, so after about 5 turns my page file usage is running at 950 meg. Since I have 2 gig in my computer this isn't a problem for me at this point, but I can see where it would be a big problem for those who only have 1 gig. On a fresh reboot I start with approximately 230 meg and after I play 6 turns, save, get out of the game I have around 270 meg. It appears to me that even if I exit the game SEV doesn't release all of the memory it used. The latter part may be common with most other programs as well.

Here's my take on the memory leak: it appears as though SEV does not release the previous turns data. What I mean by this is that by the time you get to turn 5, turns 1-4 are still in the page file.

Anybody else noticed the same thing I have? If my observations can be confirmed or debunked we may be able to help Aaron isolate the memory leak problem and finally get it fixed. It is my opinion that the next patch should concentrate solely on fixing the memory leak.

Edit: After playing another 5 turns I noticed the same thing about page file usage, however when I quit the page file usage returned to about the same size I had when I started. This leads me to believe that SEV does clear itself out of memory when you quit the game, but still retains each turn in the page file while playing.

Any thoughts?

[Fyron]

Even if SE5 didn't explicitly clear its memory when it exited, the kernel level process management routines will free up all virtual memory mapped by an application upon termination. Unless you are using some garbage OS like win98, though; with win9x, anything can happen.

[BlueTemplar]

With hard disk space cheap as it is now, I've simply set the swap file to 4096 Mb (max) on my faster disk, while Se5 is installed on the secondary slower disk. Since I only have 512Mb SDRAM, it greatly helps.

[Spoo]

Maybe SE5 is keeping combat replays in RAM?

[Demorve]

I have mine set to 4092 and I use XP professional, but that doesn't explain why the game crashes when the page file hits 1.2gb to 1.5gb on my system.

The only explanation I can come up with is this; SEV stores the previous turn in the page file. When you hit the next turn button SEV goes to virtual memory and brings that information to ram. Since each turn appears to use only 100-150megs in the page file and the game, at least on mine, and uses between 400-500meg of ram, this wouldn't be a problem. However if SEV brings the entire page file allocated to the game into memory it would become a problem.