Severe Memory Leak

[Someone75]

Hello, I am currently using Phoenix Viewer 1.6.1.1961 and there is a severe memory leak.

I love the viewer and have tried others like second life V2 viewer and firestorm but I like phoenix better. Firestorm breaks flexi prims and V2 is "sluggish" to me. So I am looking into a way of fixing the severe memory leak in pheonix viewer.

Here is a picture of how much memory phoenix viewer uses at the start up:

http://i1146.photobucket.com/albums/o540/FFggjfjfjfjff/memoryleak.png

The viewer uses about 720K kbps(700~mbps) at start up. After about 20 minutes it climbs to 850K. Another 20~30 minutes it hits 1000K then to 1200K and if I have anything else major opened on my pc it will crash because my computer has only 4GB of memory. Also when it crashes the CPU usage is always below 10% if that is another clue.

I have a 2.67Ghz core I5 processor, evga 560Ti with correctly updated graphic drivers, 4GB of memory, and a regular disk harddrive (Graphic driver version 295.73).

Does anyone have any clue what could be causing this severe memory leak? This ONLY happens with phoenix viewer.

Is there a fix to this problem? Any advice will help!

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Since this only happens on your Pheonix viewer why not ask this question over on the Pheonix site?  Memory leaks and SL have been complained about for years.  I've never experienced a memory leak on any veiwer (even back when there was only the SL viewer that was supported was available to use).  What I've concluded over the years is that the memory leaks that people complain about are related to the users' computers and not the viewer.  Yes, it is possible that a viewer is the culprit but since I don't use Pheonix (or any TPV for that matter..........personal choice, so don't attack me) I haven't a clue if it's Pheonix's problem or not.  But historically, as far as I can see, it's been the users computers or the setup of those computers.

Does this "memory leak" eventually lead to a crash?  Or does it just mystify you?

 

[Someone75]

The memory leak does lead to a crash after about a 40 minutes or so when the usage goes to 1400K kbps. Crashing also happens when I move my in world camera around a lot of people which boosts the memory usage crashing the viewer.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

What operating system are you using?  I'm a Windows user and since I've been SL I've had XP, Vista, and Windows 7.  My mermory says that most of the "memory leaks" complaints happened back when XP was the most used OS.   I image you are probably using Win7 judgeing by the i5 CPU so I can't relate much to XP or Vista (but some people are almost fanatical about XP being the best ever OS).  I did notice that you have 4 GB system memory which is not really a lot (but should be more than adequate for SL).  Background stuff might be at the core of the problem.  Win 7 wants about a GB to run all by itself and SL wants as much as it can get up to about a GB.  That leaves you two gigs to spare and if something is not releasing memory as it should then it wouldn't take very long to run out of memory and crash you.  Try looking at your security software (especially if you are using Norton or Semantic).  There's a lot of stuff being tossed back and forth between your computer and the servers and security software monitors all the traffic........try temporarily shuting down the AV to see if the problem continues.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Someone75 wrote:

 

The viewer uses about 720K kbps(700~mbps) at start up. After about 20 minutes it climbs to 850K. Another 20~30 minutes it hits 1000K then to 1200K and if I have anything else major opened on my pc it will crash because my computer has only 4GB of memory.

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I'm not the most educated person when it comes to the inner works of a computer, but aren't you talking about two completely different things? Why are you so convinced the high network rate is affecting your memory use?

There's a nasty bug with high network traffic, but as far as I know that's a server issue so that should cause problems on every viewer..just crossed my mind.

Your computer crashing after about an hour with both SL and something else "major" running, could be an indication of overheating of the GPU or CPU.

So do you monitor your temps and if so, what are they?

How much memory does SL use just before it crashes?

[Someone75]

I'm very careful with my computer, I keep my CPU temps at 30-40C when running phoenix viewer/any other high end game. (Copper heat sink)  My graphic card temperature never goes above 65C when it crashes (or in any other game I play). I have very good airflow so heat isn't the problem.

I start to notice the sluggish starting at around 1200K kpbs usage and when it reaches 1300+ I start to get 1 fps/second and I have to ctrl-alt-delete and force the program to close. This "sluggish" fps behavior also starts when there are a lot of people on screen and I "swing" my camera around, the viewer takes a few seconds to "think".

In a lightely crowded area I can reach 40-60+FPS on max settings.

Do you think the cause could be coming from my mcafee virus program? It's the only thing I can think of because years ago I had to allow a older game not to be scanned by it to run the game.

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

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Someone75 wrote:

I'm very careful with my computer, I keep my CPU temps at 30-40C when running phoenix viewer/any other high end game. (Copper heat sink)  My graphic card temperature never goes above 65C when it crashes (or in any other game I play). I have very good airflow so heat isn't the problem.

I start to notice the sluggish starting at around 1200K kpbs usage and when it reaches 1300+ I start to get 1 fps/second and I have to ctrl-alt-delete and force the program to close. This "sluggish" fps behavior also starts when there are a lot of people on screen and I "swing" my camera around, the viewer takes a few seconds to "think".

In a lightely crowded area I can reach 40-60+FPS on max settings.

Do you think the cause could be coming from my mcafee virus program? It's the only thing I can think of because years ago I had to allow a older game not to be scanned by it to run the game.

 

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Actually what you're reporting is exactly what I went through with Viewer 3 - it's a case of the viewer not releasing memory it uses for graphics processing in crowded areas. It was a problem with all the mesh viewers - it may have been partially fixed with the latest Viewer 3 and Firestorm but the mesh version of Phoenix hasn't been updated recently. Moving the camera controls around in crowded areas will cause your memory use to gradually get worse and worse until it hits a point that the viewer uses all the memory it can address and it crashes. Since most viewers are 32-bit applications they can only use about 1.5 gigabytes. I had more than enough free memory; the viewer wasn't able to use it though. I don't know if it affects all possible combinations of hardware but Linden Lab has acknowledged that it's a problem and have made various attempts to fix it.

I got around it by using the brute-force approach of using viewers that have 64-bit installer versions that can address more memory (Dolphin and Exodus are two.) I don't know if that would help if you only have 4 gb total memory (I have 6 gb). One thing that worked for me with some earlier mesh viewers was turning atmospheric shaders off then on (or even vice versa), which would release a fair-sized chunk of memory and delay the crash. I also tried to avoid moving my camera any more than necessary when in crowded locations and turned down my graphics settings in crowded areas as well.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

No idea if the virus scanner is causing any issues, it's not impossible but also not probable I guess. Only one way to find out for sure, but do you want to take that risk?

I still don't see the connection between the high bandwidth and your memory issue though.

[solstyse]

I don't know if this is at all helpful. I hope it is.

The latest version of firestorm seems to be the most stable viewer I've tried to date. but previus versions of it were the LEAST stable, at least for me. My computer doesn't get along with singularity, but some people have much better luck with it. (I know it's because my antivirus software automatically sandboxes any program it can't find enough info on.) And Neiran's never crashed for me, but it seemed like the screen would constantly flash as if it was reconfiguring something.

The earliest mesh viewers performed very poorly for me.I was wishing for the speed and stability of pre-mesh Phoenix for a long, long time. The catch was that people around me were using Mesh too often for me to revert to a viewer that couldn't see it. Now that Firestorm is onto version 4.2.2.29837, I feel like I've gotten my wish. Everything loads so beautifullly and consistantly that now it's hard for me to tell the difference between mesh and old fashioned items (That's a good thing.) And I can turn all the shaders on and still walk, which I haven't been able to do for a long time. I think it's time you give Firestorm another chance. Someone had to work very hard to convicne me, since I was ready to give up on it altogether after version 4.1. But I'm glad I did. As an added bonus, with the flexible gui, you can make it look almost like Phoenix.

[Theresa Tennyson]

For most of the time mesh as been used, the viewers used a third-party memory manager called "tcmalloc". It was a major suspect for memory problems. My understanding is that Firestorm changed to a different memory manager for this release, and that Linden Lab is currently working with a different one in part of their development plans. They mentioned in a meeting that getting rid of "tcmalloc" reduced the memory use by 20%.

[Coventina Dalgleish]

Open the task manager and see how much proc time MacAfee is using while you are in the game. I am not familiar with the current MacAfee  it should have an area to exclude programs from scanning. I noticed with several other virus scanners they over work when SL is active slowing the system and eating resources If you have multiple cores assign it to a single core.

[Nalates Urriah]

Think in another direction... Theresa Tennyson has the latest tech info on the problem. Memory leaks are often a combination of software (the viewer) and drivers in your computer. Since you did not give us the info from the virewer's Help->About we cannot see what version of what you are running. It is always good to post that info when asking a tech question.

Without the information all we can do is guess what the problem may be. You are left to test each suggestion and try to find the right one. It will be much faster for you if you provide version info up front.

The latest nVidia driver is 306.23.

Since Firestorm is the most stable viewer connecting to SL right now, I would look at everything else before considering the viewer. 

[Phil Deakins]

Just to make it perfectly clear:- kbps is nothing to do with memory useage (or memory leaks). It mean kilobits per second, and is the speed of downloading data. I.e. it is bandwidth (someone mentioned it twice already).

As the speed (kbps) increases, the computer has more work to do, and it can appear to become slower, although it's probably working faster than when the speed was lower. It seems like it would account for your fps getting lower, but computers continually communicate with the source (constant handshaking) and your computer keeps telling the souce (SL) to send the next lot of data.

Since your fps decreases (that's a figure produced by SL according to the data it is actually sending you), SL is sending less and less screen-updating data, so the question is, where is the ever-increasing data coming from? Perhaps it is data concerning the mass of avatars in the places you frequent.

Those are my thoughts, anyway. It's nothing to do with memory leaks. That is unless your memory useage also increases, of course.