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OUT OF MEMORY: WE NEED YOUR HELP!

Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2415

OUT OF MEMORY: WE NEED YOUR HELP!

There is a nasty memory leak that we're having a heck of a time tracking down.

It doesn't happen consistently and in fact, it doesn't happen to us at all.

Here is what we need:

1. If have experienced out of memory problems, low the game resolution and run the game in a window so that you can bring up that task manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc).

2. On the Processes list, you should see Elemental. Its memory should start at around 600MB and, over the course of a game, creep up to around 1.2GB. This is normal.

3. The memory, once you get going in the game, should NEVER go up by more than 5MB in a given turn. If it does, then whatever is triggering the memory explosion has started.

4. We are looking for saved games, theories, debug.err files, anything that can help us reproduce it. If we can reproduce it, we can eliminate it in hours. But it's the reproducing that's giving us fits.

Thanks!

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Play long enough on a windows vista premium 32bit, and you get OOM as well. Mem used showed 1.6 Gig at the error (on a system with 3 Gig RAM). Elemental was showing 1 Gig of ram usage on Task Man. After I clicked the the "Ok" button, it took a few seconds, then memory reported dropped very quickly on the task. It paused at 70K, then completed going away.

Since the computer itself had plenty of RAM available, is the Out of Memory error a resource allocation error and it is being lableled "OOM" in the error message? Or perhaps an "Out of Memory" error from the graphic cards? I've seen a graphical resource allocation error report "Out of Memory" because it couldn't get allocate in a small span of time, particularly on multithreaded apps. You will then have plenty of memory, and you'l be scratchng your head over where the memory allocation error is coming from. My professional experience with such intuits me to target your resource allocations--- graphical and sound being the most likely. However, I'm not a game developer, although I am a software developer.

Good luck pinning this down.

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I can confirm the 32bit Vista OOM as well. Do you want me to play through on a leak hunt or have you already found it?

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I have had several ooms on xp 32bit with the terminal ram point of approximatly 1.6Gb used byelemental, and even on win7 64bit the terminal ram is always 1.6gb used, and I think it might be useful for them to have the err & dmps available if they want them.

and they have found a big resource leak with ati 5 series cards, and I have post a error that hints to the sounds, and it would be a good idea for them to have more ooms with sound suspects

harpo

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upon further testing in my win7 64bit ati5850 system, turning the ingame audio off helps to play approx 20 turns from the one turn oom save, then disabling in windows device manager the ati sound controller with the ingame sounds off I can play approx 50 turns from the same point.

based upon this observation I think that there is some ram leak in the sound/music code that is made worse by having more than one soundcard active in the computer in win7.

also the OOM point increased to 1.712GB ram use with the ingame sounds off from 1.6gb with ingame sounds on.

I have 5 dmp/err/save/map/unit/dxdiags from this testing

harpo

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Here is one of those 'out of memory' errors... crashed the game at 1.34GB and this system has 4gigs of ram with very little running in the background.

Link: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9396252/Out_of_Memory/Elemental0_98-2010-08-09T03-20-04-265.zip

Also here is the autosave which hangs while attempting to reload... should be some clues in here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9396252/Out_of_Memory/AutoSave.EleSav

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I consistently get OOM errors after 650 turns.

Running on the following environment:

AMD Phemon II X4 (65 (3.2 Ghz)

8GB DDR2 RAM

Nvidia EVGA GTX260 w 896 MB

Motherboard ASUS M3N-HT (Nforce 780a Chipset)

Creative X-Fi Titanium Champion PCI-E Sound Card

O/S Windows 7 Ultimate (64 Bit)

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Crashed with an out of memory message. Just lucky that Elemental is a 32bit application as my machine wasn't out.

Task Man read: 1,712,400k at crash of Elemental.exe *32

No dump file was made.

Here is the last auto save. Don't know if it reproduces from autosaves.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/714037/Elemental/AutoSave.EleSav

Here is a debug.err file it made at the time of crash.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/714037/Elemental/debug.7z

I seem to be running the doom hardware.

Core 2 Duo @2.23, 4GB RAM, Ati 3650, Win7 x64

Follow Up: My save game from the game with the memory error refuses to load.

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Here's another one for you to look at. Out of memory crash while playing.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7298707/Elemental0_98-2010-08-09T22-34-26-224.zip

Including my saved game file. When I load my game, it starts at 600MB used. Every turn causes the memory to go up by a lot. I can hit over 800MB in just a few turns.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7298707/AutoSave.EleSav

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I've noticed that the Dynasty page (in addition to the Design Units page) also seems to add a large chunk of memory that doesn't get cleared. My guess is that it is related to the 3d character model that is displayed on these pages. Switching between units while still on the Design Units page also causes uncleared increases in memory.

I also noticed increases in memory when switching between factions on the Choose Faction page.

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Has this problem been fixed yet?

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frogboy in one of his posts has said that they have fixed a major memory leak on ATI win7 64bit and a minor memory leak that affects all.

harpo

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More significantly, it has now gone gold. Any bets this issue has been fixed? I think I will wait and see...

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I am having this out of memory, memory leak. I can usually play for about 30 to 60 minutes before everything on the screen locks up and then I can still move the cursor around and still hear the music playing alright but I can't click on anything or hot key into any menus up interface so I alt delete out several times and when I have finally stopped the game from running I get the little "out of memory" window on my desk top.

Yesterday I went to quit the game out of the main menu and my computer blue screen stating there were memory problems and restarted

I am using the latest ATI cat drivers 10.7 and my system specs are: Vista 64bit ultimate SP2, Intel quad core I7 920 @ 2.67Ghz, Radeon HD 5970 with 2GBs Video memory, 4 gigs corsair system ram. 150GB WD raptor x2 in raid 0. ASUS PST moterboard nothing is overclocked or ever has been and other games run fine.

Also I'm finding I can't load previous saves unless I alt delete out of the game then shut down impulse and restart it and the game then go to the same save and launch it and then it will load.

I hope this problem will be fixed soon, as it is pretty serious and I don't want this happening after the release of the full and final version.

It is unplayable as it is now and I see there are many here with this same problem.

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Also, I forgot to mention I am using my mainboard's on board sound which is realtek I have tried turning off all sound in the game and this does nothing to stop the same memory problems and crashing.

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frogboy in another thread said that they had found a MAJOR ram leak with ATI on 64bit and fixed it, but did not get into the betas, so to see if it IS the fix we will have to wait for the gold/day0 versions.

harpo

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Thanks for letting me know, harpo, and I hope you are right.

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I also hope that they DID find the ram leaks, and that the ati leak fixes the ati computers as both of my top gaming comps are ati carded.

harpo

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I posted this on a separate thread regarding this problem under Windows 7 -- but as it seems to be a more general issue, I'm posting it again here. I have a number of zipped files to share.

I'm having similar problems to the others described there. Game running fine, then randomly freezes. I get the "Out of Memory" error, although I didn't realize this until recently because the game screen remained superimposed over the error box. I've put a number of the zipped dump files up on Dropbox (I assume they were all created as this happened periodically over the last few weeks). Links to these files are posted below.

I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit OS. It's an ASUS Notebook 360 series, with an Intel Core i7 CPU, 6GB of RAM. MY video card is an NVIDIA GeForce GTS 360M, most recent drivers installed. The game runs beautifully with all the settings turned up high, except for this unpredictable problem. It does not seem to happen at set intervals for me - sometimes 10 minutes sometimes 2 hours.

Also. I've been running it as Administrator as recommended by some posts above but that doesn't seem to make a difference.

Thanks for this game - been very excited for it. First video game I ever got was Master of Magic, this is clearly new territory but I can see the inspiration. Please fix this bug soon though!! Hope the files below help!

I have 12 of the requested files to share, happening over about a month.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10248759/Elemental0_92-2010-07-26T02-02-25-607.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10248759/Elemental0_92-2010-07-26T02-16-39-990.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10248759/Elemental0_92-2010-07-27T01-37-05-239.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10248759/Elemental0_92-2010-07-27T01-58-57-168.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10248759/Elemental0_92-2010-07-27T22-24-10-437.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10248759/Elemental0_92-2010-07-27T22-53-13-799.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10248759/Elemental0_98-2010-08-06T20-05-26-224.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10248759/Elemental0_98-2010-08-06T20-32-46-803.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10248759/Elemental0_98-2010-08-06T21-10-31-900.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10248759/Elemental0_98-2010-08-06T21-43-57-202.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10248759/Elemental0_98-2010-08-08T23-50-54-445.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10248759/Elemental0_98-2010-08-17T21-02-37-70.zip

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Same problem, keeping task manager open, whenever I do anything new it uses more and more memory while never reducing.

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Still having these problems in the latest production build (version 1.05.016)

The added new content is nice, but I was hoping this problem had been slain in the patches. Not so, unfortunately.

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Update --- I got Out of Memory error during a SAVE. Not fun.

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I have looked at the err reports and it always seems that the OOM happens in a save.

might be worth while to look in the code that does the saves.

harpo

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Same thing happening in the 1.06 version (although it seems to run much more smoothly). The OOM crashes are far less frequent to me then they were in beta and they indeed happen only when saving game (makes no difference if its quicksave or normal save from menu).

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awuffleablehedgie

Join Date 04/2009

+60

I'd like to concur that saving the game seems to be the memleak. It's funny, actually.

1) I am worried that the game will crash (because of reports on the forums, and ATI business from before)

2) Therefore, I enable autosave every turn

3) Game becomes unplayable after about half an hour or so. I get frustrated and stop playing. 1.05 does not fix the issue.

4) Read about it on the forums. Turn autosave to every 5 turns. Get engrossed in a new game (for the first time, mind you) and play for 3 hours before slow-down, losing completely track of the time.

I would think that since people are worried about stability, they are increasing the frequency in which they save, making the game MORE AND MORE unstable, leading to additional frustration.

Rig:

Win 7 x64

ATI Radeon HD 3400 Mobile (on 10.1 Catalyst, cannot update past it due to OEM restrictions).

Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.24 GHz

4 GB RAM

I would also like to note that the second I destroyed an enemy Sov the game INSTANTLY started playing REALLY bad with the 3D models (something that doesn't always work that great but I know that is halfway just because of an older/weaker videocard). It may be trying to render old artifacts and then removing them, or something like that.

Another bug is when you ask Champion to marry you, the "Propose" icon remains in the Action toolbar until you "click-off" her. Clicking it does nothing (that I could tell). It's probably a similar bug as to the "build multiple building" bug where you can build as many of a particular building as you want as long as you don't deselect.

AI was a bit better, but tends to leave cities protected solely by champions, and OMFG ATTACKED ME WITH A DECENT ARMY (I think 10 units, including Sov). Sadly, I was able to defeat it with my smaller number (but somewhat superior) amount of units, but they almost got my Sov dead (with spells).

Haste and Quicken are rather OP with the current battle system... also, Teleport is >> I think that Kingdoms should be like Empires. Teleport/Blink is Level 3, and Imbue Champion is your free "starting" spell.

Though, yay for first good night with Elemental ~~~~

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and I have another OOM win7 64bit ati and as usual it is on a turn with save game

updated to 1.06.19 (and had a LOT of difficulty and time to download ie 4 hours for a mere 9.7mb on a 1.5mb/s adsl1 east coast australia)

started a new game on map huge custom sov, kraxis empire with tree other kingdoms/empires on map

played to tun 135 (note 1.05.16 got to turn 160, 1.05.16 with old ati 10.7 got to turn 140 so not as good as 1.05.16 as far as leakage)

oom zip created added saves,dxdiags & err

had looked at end of err and saw as usual the last entries are to do with saving.

harpo

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