Memory Usage With 32-bit Post Patch 0.11.4

Ok, I've been thinking about making a thread like this for quite some time now. I've been playing PoE consistently since open beta (played some closed beta) and the entire time I've been plagued by the game taking up so much memory that I eventually crash from changing areas (32-bit Windows 7 and I have 4 gigs installed, 3.18 that are recognized). In the beginning it wasn't so bad, I could play for quite a long time and only crash once or twice which was not a big deal.

The problem got worse and worse, especially when in a group (doing maps for instance) and so I decided to see if there was something I could do to fix it. There's plenty of things that have been posted by GGG to help fix this and I believe I've tried them all. I've tried --gc1 and --gc2. I've tried going into the config file and lowering the textures to 3 (helped a little) and all the way down to 5 (helps a decent amount but still crashes and the game looks REALLY bad).
MY SOLUTION: The best solution that I could find was to completely disable sound which frees up a lot of memory with --nosound and medium textures (for some reason I have to use 2 "--" for nosound to work). I believe I only crashed once ever when using --nosound. This seems like the best solution because the game still looks good on medium textures and the game almost never crashes however it would be nice to have sound.

For reference I tend to keep my task manager open and look at it every once in a while to see how much memory PoE is taking up and here are the numbers: normal game launch is around 900 MB. Launch with --nosound is around 600 MB. I seem to always crash between 1,600 and 1,700 MB.

Having gone through all of this I was really excited when I heard 0.11.4 was going to fix all of these memory issues. Much to my dismay as I logged in today (removing --gc2 and --nosound) I still loaded up to around 900 MB. So I thought that maybe it just wouldn't increase in memory so fast so I joined a map group and did some maps. I did about 3 or 4 maps and my memory was already at 1,500 MB. The group died so I joined a party for lunaris runs and on the start of the 3rd one I crashed with around 1,650 MB used.

This might have gotten a little bit better post patch but I still crashed very quickly and didn't really notice any difference myself. So I finally decided to make this thread in the hopes that I have either missed something or that GGG can take this information and improve the situation. Perhaps with implementing better garbage collection so that the used memory doesn't stay so high.

Anyways, hope this gets resolved someday. Cheers to you and an awesome game GGG.

I just wish I could hear it...

EDIT: I've already tried all variations of the gc command (-gc1, -gc 1, --gc1, --gc 1 etc)

Right, you say you use --gc1 or --gc2 if you have used them as you typed them they will do nothing the command line you should be suing is either -gc 1 or -gc 2 difference being one less - and a space between the gc and one/two

No sound command line can either be --nosound(which is correct -nosound wouldn't work) or -ns

Also the big ass patch that was just released should have fixed most of the problems associated with 32 bit operating systems

If the nosound command line is stopping your crashing you might want to post the actual error message...if it is mapchunk or out of memory it is ram but if it is something else and nosound fixes it it is likely an audio problem

Thanks for the response. I've tried it with both 1 and 2 "--"s and spaces and it doesn't help.

Also the crashes are always due to memory.

Have you tried testing your RAM with Memtest86 to see if any of your RAM sticks are faulty? It could be a certain range of memory is faulty and that most other software on your computer just by pure luck, doesn't use that range of RAM and as such doesn't exhibit similar problems.

Just burn the Memtest86 disc image to a CD and then boot off the CD and let it repeat all the tests 3 to 5 times, if there are no errors ever reported then your RAM should be fine (Though you could have faulty RAM slots on the motherboard of which I've had Memtest fail to detect)

Once sufficiently tested, just reboot the computer. No need to exit the program or anything, a reboot while it is testing is perfectly safe.

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Nicholas_Steel wrote:

Have you tried testing your RAM with Memtest86 to see if any of your RAM sticks are faulty? It could be a certain range of memory is faulty and that most other software on your computer just by pure luck, doesn't use that range of RAM and as such doesn't exhibit similar problems.

Just burn the Memtest86 disc image to a CD and then boot off the CD and let it repeat all the tests 3 to 5 times, if there are no errors ever reported then your RAM should be fine (Though you could have faulty RAM slots on the motherboard of which I've had Memtest fail to detect)

Once sufficiently tested, just reboot the computer. No need to exit the program or anything, a reboot while it is testing is perfectly safe.

I don't think the problem's with the player's hardware. I've seen numerous people claiming to have experienced the same thing (including me) on global, and I've asked around as well and there are at least 4-5 players were having the same issues just as what have been posted here.

I did some testing on the client itself when it got so bad my client crashed almost every 3-4 map switches in act 3. I noticed that this game has some serious resource management issue which almost resembles a memory leak (the problem's so consistent and can be easily reproduced that it is actually worse than a memory leak). Everytime the client loads a new map, all resources needed for that map seems to have to be loaded regardless of what previous state you're in, some maps (I'm not talking about 'map' maps, but zone maps in general) consumes soo much memory that it ending in a total consumption for a single app (the PoE client) to go well beyond what a 32-bit system's capable of handling. The client does not stagger the resource loading, does not preserve a fixed container size and dump unnecessary resources, it just, loads everything...

The issue might be less prominent on 64-bit systems due to the bigger memory pool. But I can honestly say this, in the past 12 years of online gaming experience, I've never played a game that requires a 64-bit memory management to work properly. Not even on any of the new MMOs that have been released in the past 3 years (and yes, I've played a lot of MMORPGs). I know this is an F2P game, so this issue might not be on top of GGG's priority of fixes, but telling people to do workarounds (by reducing texture sizes, disabling sound, etc.) or telling players to buy a better pc setup aren't the good way to solve it, and I'm pretty sure the guys from GGG knows this as well.

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Vipermagi wrote:

"The issue might be less prominent on 64-bit systems due to the bigger memory pool."
The problem does not exist on 64-bit systems, assuming the system has 6 gigs of RAM or more. Can just load the whole thing into RAM and have some to spare.

Now it can, with the Large Address Aware flag set for the executable file of course (Allowing 32bit programs to consume up to 4GB of RAM under a 64bit O/S). Before this patch it couldn't as the game was larger then 4GB in total size.

You'll need more then 4GB of RAM though to ensure some is left over for the O/S to use.


Oh and now that everything is smaller file size wise, they can store more different stuff in RAM which is likely why RAM consumption didn't neccesarily change. Instead of being able to have 50 things loaded and 40 things unloaded until needed, it's now like 80 things loaded and 10 things unloaded until needed (For example).

So 2 years on and this still is an issue and unfixed, or am I the only one playing on 32bit windows 7?

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HypusMaximus wrote:

So 2 years on and this still is an issue and unfixed, or am I the only one playing on 32bit windows 7?

It's not an issue the can really fix for you...it's a limitation of your OS/physical ram not the game...the fix would be for them to remove many assets from ram and load the on the fly when needed ,see opening a strongbox when it freezes...that would happen every time you come across something new

And tbh the only way you could fix that problem is by using an SSD...and it's still not 100%