GGG is ZERO help so let's get serious on why some players have major lags with Synthesis

Blight League (SSF):

Played a new build (Necromancer) all the way through and killed act 5 Kitava. Sailed back to Wraeclast and then wham:



Running patch 3.8.1. Dell T3610 with Xeon 1620 v2 cpu (stock speed), Windows 7 Pro with 16 GB rdimm DDR3-1600 ram, Nvidia 1060 AMP! 6 GB (Forceware 419.67), and 500 GB SSD. Had my Vivaldi browser and PoB running. Tried to bring up the task manager of Windows 7 Pro to see what PoE did to use up the memory running from Act 2 to Act 6 continous (no game restart) but Windows 7 popped up another error message window saying the task manager couldn't run but the screen dump didn't work. Event Viewer only shows this:



Nothing of help in Event Viewer other than 4 entries down PoE caused an application error in my Vivaldi browser and it crashed too. Windows 7 shut down PoE and freed up the memory so I didn't need to reboot.

So patch 3.8.1 has eliminated my DCs to WDC or Dallas (very good) but some other bug foobar-ed me out after progressing through 4 zones. Oh well, at least my hardware upgrade is allowing PoE to play more smoothly in the acts. No problems in tower defense yet.

Edit: Restarted PoE and I'm in act 6 Lioneye's Watch so that's good.

So here we are 1 month into Blight. I finally get interested in playing a specmancer/summoner build and after playing for several hours and into level 8 I get this:



Say what? Since my original posts I have upgraded my gaming rig. Specs are now:

Dell T3610 
1. Intel Xeon E5-1620 v2 cpu (3.7 - 3.9 GHz)
2. 16 GB of rdimm memory (registered DDR3-1600)
3. Geforce 1060 AMP! 6 GB video
4. Samsung 840 500 GB SSD
5. Windows 7 Pro (without the performance robbing Meltdown or Spectre patches)

So now with 16 GB (twice as before) and with a minion build PoE is really a resource memory hog and eventually Windows 7 Pro thinks there isn't enough ram. This is a weird message to see as you can clearly see my total used ram at the time of this is only about 11.3 GB used. Only other programs running were my browser (Vivaldi) and PoB. I have not turned off the virtual memory function of Windows so I really shouldn't be getting this message at all. PoE didn't crash so I could do a normal exit and restart so that was good.

On the bright side I was speculating when I got my T3610 whether I should stay with the 4 core, 8 thread E5-1620 v2 cpu or get the E5-2643 v2 with 6 cores (12 threads but only 3.4 to 3.8 GHz). I had asked and the general consensus was that PoE only used 4 cores and my task manager is verifying that only 4 cores are in use. Windows 7 Pro correctly assigned PoE to each of the physical cores and didn't double up on any 1 core (the 2, 4, 6, 8 threads aren't being used).

Blight league with the GGG emphasis on minion builds requires a lot more memory to run and this proves that no longer is 8 GB enough ram and the move up to 16 GB is required (even 12 GB is probably not enough to keep the OS from memory swapping).

My simple error running PoE also points out a bigger long term problem that GGG has that is (should be) very concerning to all. This being that as GGG rushes headlong releasing new complicated (from a programmers perspective) challenge leagues every 3 months (as per their master plan to get their game played forever) they (Jonathan and the coding team) don't have the time to do proper testing/debugging. This in turn leads to the first 1/3 or 1/2 of every challenge league being a beta version PoE and we (all players) are their beta-testers. It's been this way for some time now but as more and more of the challenge league mechanics get added to the core the code size of PoE keeps growing and the interactions of all these are increasing the chances that there are more and more bugs that wreck our QoP. At some point (probably 4.0) GGG is going to have to outline to us their redesign of the way PoE is structured and hopefully Jonathan and his team have already worked out a way to control PoE's memory use so that going forward they can do a better job to keep PoE from getting way out of control, both in memory usage and in performance. As all players are viewing PoE (outside looking at GGG's black box and trying to understand what's going on inside) we're getting progressively worse QoP with each new league and at some point PoE will implode and die. This won't be a pretty sight and will certainly not make Chris happy (what the H...!, why is revenue declining?).

You can try to follow this guide made by @PunkBuzter -->
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2656123/page/3
The defrag should solve most of your problems according to him.

The OP is the type of person that looks into simplicity and finds complexity a reward.

Im having 8gb ram as well, set my poe to priority in task manager. That didnt help. But often i can see that if memory overshot, the client crashes. It is very not enjoyable to play.

The not so hard fix but also not so easy fix is,
1. GGG has to limit the number of monster variety that can be spawn in any instances. 2-3 chapters depending if the players are suffering.

2. Corpse on the ground. If they are dead and not in use, allow settings for players to make corpse disappear after 10 secs. It eats memory, not much but helps.

3. When starting the game, players have to wait until POE have loaded up 3800 MB to 4400 MB before going into any instances, this can be determine in task manager. It helps. Dont just run into a map and get rekt. Its horrible.

Its going to take players and ggg to solve this, since ggg has been shown to have difficulties in helping.