How many have experienced "memory leak" problems?

[Don Uittone]

It'd be good to know how common this is.

 

[Gav]

I had problems, but I manually fixed them

 

[phalzyr]

If you can manually fix them it isn't a memory leak in the game... this poll is kinda meaningless since a lot of the people on this forum have no clue what "memory leak" means or how to verify that it is a memory leak not just poor memory management that CIV4 does have, though patch made that better for me at least...Not that I had trouble with memory load before.

Takes a lot of memory <> memory leak
Increase amount of memory used as you play <> memory leak

It "could" be a memory leak but it could also be many other things like more units need more memory etc... A lot of the posts are read seem to confuse that fact with a memory leak.

 

[oldStatesman]

Poor choice of description for the problem, as it stands, this poll is invalid. Saying the game has a memory leak is not the correct thing at this point. That has not been proven.

The game does have resource handling issues; it is not as efficient as it should be. It does not manage memory well. This is not a leak though.

Read the entire 'Memory Leak" thread here in Bug Reports to see it is not really a memory leak. Even though the thread title suggests otherwise.

 

[Flak]

I must be lucky. The game runs smooth all the way through and my RAM usage stays at around 200 - 250 Mb, creeping up to that 250 mark towards the end of the game. On a huge map full of civs, there are no problems. However, I have a massive slowdown while the game calculates the score afterwords, but even during this period, the RAM usage peaks at just under 300 Mb never going over.

Pentium 4 3.1 GHz
512 Gig RAM
ATI Radeon 9000 64Mb
Windows XP SP1

I had to install a new video driver to get this game to run. I'm now going to mess around with a few things to get my wonder movies playing without stutters. There are no RAM spikes during that choppy mess, so I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with any memory leak.

 

[AsnoT]

the game doesn't have one.
read the "memory leak" thread please

 

[Nicos_Rex]

Whilst I agree that if one wishes to be pedantic this poll is invalid since most of us are not qualified to state categorically if the problems we are experiencing are due to a memory leak, it still can have some validity if enough people respond.

I actually don't care if the problem is a memory leak or not.

What I care about is the fact that despite having spent hours searching for, and trying, solutions posted on this and other fora, I am still unable to enjoy this game due to slowdown, which is invariably followed by lockup or ctd.

(Note, I have emailed 2kgames, enclosing all the information they could reasonably expect anybody to provide and to date have only received a standard email in response)

 

[phalzyr]

the game doesn't have one.
read the "memory leak" thread please

Just becasue the main shouted reason for a memory leak is inncorect doesn't mean there isn't one. though if there is it must be in part of the code I don't use...

Any way the title should be changed to "memory leak/memory hog" or memory mismanagement so it is more relevant. I guess we can just pretend it does

 

[Harkonnen]

Flak
Try my 1961 AD savegame from here:
http://www.sampo.ru/~headden/
Please tell me what would you vote then.... (this savegame is ~10 turns from space race victory, but I've thrown it away; it just became too unpleasant to play)

 

[Emerentius]

i don't know how to call it and i really dont care but if i'm running civ 4 and do nothing, after some time, my system reboots.
so i'm voting yes.
btw changing the ini settings seems to work.

 

[AsnoT]

Flak
Try my 1961 AD savegame from here:
http://www.sampo.ru/~headden/
Please tell me what would you vote then.... (this savegame is ~10 turns from space race victory, but I've thrown it away; it just became too unpleasant to play)

uses the usual >800mb ram, but runs as smoothly as my own games.
what a pity that it's unplayable for you

nice russian empire you've built there

 

[Charles 22]

I voted that I could not play it anymore. the reality is that my answer is between that and the next worst one. The reason for that, is I can usually play to the mid portion of the game without a crash, though it had gone down before that a number of times. The phase where I was playing to learn is over, and since I can't possibly win the game since I can't get past the mid-point the game is sort of non-functional, since there's not a whole lot of point in playing a game you can never reach the end with.

 

[Harkonnen]

AsnoT
It won't run nicely for me because I have 512Mb RAM Though, some 1Gb guys suffer with that savegame too... They say OS consumes 1.6Gb totally with civ4. Probably this is some problem with their systems, I don't know.

P.S: That's Indian empire

 

[AsnoT]

AsnoT
It won't run nicely for me because I have 512Mb RAM Though, some 1Gb guys suffer with that savegame too... They say OS consumes 1.6Gb totally with civ4. Probably this is some problem with their systems, I don't know.

here, i haven't seen it go above 800+ ever - even when i had 1gb (that would be last week) of ram, that's why i'm wondering.

any information on the influence of the OS used? i suspect winXP to be a part of the problem.

 

[Renata]

Whilst I agree that if one wishes to be pedantic this poll is invalid since most of us are not qualified to state categorically if the problems we are experiencing are due to a memory leak, it still can have some validity if enough people respond.

I actually don't care if the problem is a memory leak or not.

What I care about is the fact that despite having spent hours searching for, and trying, solutions posted on this and other fora, I am still unable to enjoy this game due to slowdown, which is invariably followed by lockup or ctd.

(Note, I have emailed 2kgames, enclosing all the information they could reasonably expect anybody to provide and to date have only received a standard email in response)

Turning off background processes (in particular my virus killer and firewall) completely stopped slowdowns for me in version 1.00. (Haven't had time to download 1.09 yet.) You might want to try that if you haven't already. I had the same issue with the first version of CivIII before I patched, so I have some hope CivIV will follow the same path eventually. In the meantime, I can play well enough to get by.

 

[cwaugh]

the game doesn't have one.

I'm pretty sure it does. In my case I 'manually fixed' the worst one by turning off movies. I have a screenshot of TaskManager that shows the (pre-patch) game churning through another 250 MB while trying to load a Wonder movie.

 

[Harkonnen]

AsnoT
This may be OS caching disk operations. When MemUsage is abouve VirtualMem, it means that memory is used to cache disk reads/writes. But this drops down pretty soon as long as all the data is committed to disk.

I really don't know why it consumes 1.6Gb. Probably it's not OS but D3D kernel allocations (which I can't track) which are result of invalid D3D calls from civ4 side.

 

[Swiss Bezerker]

I get them sometimes but not enough to stop me from playing. BTW you have been swearing in the poll

 

[Flak]

Flak
Try my 1961 AD savegame from here:
http://www.sampo.ru/~headden/
Please tell me what would you vote then.... (this savegame is ~10 turns from space race victory, but I've thrown it away; it just became too unpleasant to play)

Sorry I didn't come back to this thread until just now. Anyway, I loaded up your game and I have a few observations:

1. It took over 5 minutes to load the game up. None of my previous saves, though few, have take more than 3 minutes.

2. The game actually choked up and froze for a minute or so when I tried to zoom out. I'd never had any problems with this before.

3. I lost the ability to move across the map holding down the left click button while zoomed out.

4. Major slowdown when going into the city screen.

5. I got a message that I had never gotten before saying that my virtual RAM setting was too low and that it was being automatically increased. Once that happened, issues 2, 3, and 4 went away. Then the game was as smooth as ever.

6. After I shutdown CivIV, the executable continued to run! It ran for another 90 seconds slowly decreasing its RAM usage, until it finally shutdown completely. I've never seen that behavior before and I have been watching on several occasions, especially the huge-map-all-civs ones, just to see how clean it shuts down.

Here's a screenshot:



You'll notice that my 'Zugesichter speicher' is well over 1 Gig. That number has never gone over 770 Mb. It's a little bit odd that it's showing 00% of the CPU. It was and is usually around 25%.

So you definitely have something special going on here, besides an awesome empire. I don't know why none of my own games have had these symptons. It's very curious that after my virtual RAM was increased, everything got smooth. Obviously there is not much more to test in that particular game. It's pretty much maxed out. I guess I could start pumping out units and seeing if some things would change. I will run a couple more tests with it.

 

[Harkonnen]

Flak
Thanks for the info and for the shot. As I've noticed from other games I downloaded:

1) Memory usage is proportional to amount of land (I mean not water).

2) Memory usage is proportional to amount of improvements, especially roads and cottages/villages/towns.

Probablty that's the thing that makes by savegame so different. I don't have much units - a single defender per border city, 14 stacked workers somewhere in the middle, and 6-7 stacked tanks on the border.

Also, this is Terra map, and as I observed, its size in tiles is bigger than any other (even if all are huge).