Firestorm is one hell of a memory hog

[binder59]

yeah i have the same prob as well with firestorm, using memory,  mainly dulahan  host plugin seems to start up a lot of times in my processes in win 7, firesotorm uses 261,256 k of mem,

[ChibiDragon007]

On 12/21/2018 at 1:09 PM, binder59 said:

yeah i have the same prob as well with firestorm, using memory,  mainly dulahan  host plugin seems to start up a lot of times in my processes in win 7, firesotorm uses 261,256 k of mem,

Yeah I've noticed that too, a lot of dullahan host plugins, etc. From what I've read the newest version of FS 6.0.1 is less of a stable version and more of a preview of things to come in later updates? I'm not entirely sure but good lord. I tried to work an event last night in SL and crashed multiple times because FS apparently can't handle a handful of people in a sim even at the lowest possible settings with everything turned down to lowest you can get.

[ChibiDragon007]

Also to update this thread, I'm still having issues with Second Life/Firestorm on my Mac. It still uses a crap-ton of memory and with Activity Monitor on I'm getting similar if not the same numbers my previous laptop got. Even if memory pressure and such is in the green, Second Life should NOT be pushing a computer this hard just to run regardless of what sims I"m on or otherwise.

I had every setting turned extremely low last night when working an event that had multiple people on the sim (over thirty at the highest before I left) and Second Life crashed on me at least three or more times, and locked up repeatedly due to extreme lag in the region. Now that may be just a Second Life issue and not necessarily a computer one, since SL is a decade old program. Or is it simply an issue with Firestorm? I don't think it's entirely a graphics card issue (though I'm starting to think that may actually be the problem, as Macbook Pros don't have dedicated graphics cards unless you get a 15 or 17 inch model) but I'm not sure.

Basically I've tried everything I know to reduce lag, to stop my fans sounding like a jet engine and I can't manage that. So my options are to quit Second Life until I get a new computer, or switch to the default LL viewer?

Anyone have suggestions on what I could do?

[Ansariel Hiller]

23 hours ago, ChibiDragon007 said:

Basically I've tried everything I know to reduce lag, to stop my fans sounding like a jet engine and I can't manage that. So my options are to quit Second Life until I get a new computer, or switch to the default LL viewer?

Switch to the default LL viewer if it runs better!

Edited December 31, 2018 by Ansariel Hiller

[ChibiDragon007]

7 hours ago, Ansariel Hiller said:

Switch to the default LL viewer if it runs better!

i think that’s going to have to be my option I think, as much as I loathe the UI of the default viewer...

[ChibiDragon007]

UPDATE:

So I'm about 99% sure that it is SL causing most of the issues with my Macbook Pro. Both the default viewer and Firestorm cause massive heat generation and the fans sound like a jet engine, even when running for only a short amount of time regardless of what sims I'm on. I tested both empty and crowded sims and my settings are kept at the automatically detected medium.

So from my research on everything, I can safely conclude that Macbook Pro laptops are NOT suitable for using Second Life. I hope to switch to a PC in the near future. However, I did have great experiences with the iMac desktop computers when I used both the default LL viewer and Second Life. Those can run it very well.

[HeathcliffMontague]

For what it's worth... Been browsing the forum as FS has crashed on me a lot recently. "Texture overload" seems to do it these days (was pretty stable before).

I have a decent CPU, enough-ish RAM and a fast Internet connection, the GPU is very much my bottleneck (need to update). But I'm on a Win 7 64 bit desktop PC, and I just did a test, visiting my regular places etc. According to Task Manager the LL viewer (latest version) takes up slightly more RAM on average than FS - second latest FS version (about 50 % vs 47 %). But the spikes in RAM usage are much more dramatic in FS. That's after a relatively recent clean FS install. Haven't tried the most recent FS release yet.

Those spikes in RAM usage *seem* (needs more testing) to be related to the crashes.

[Whirly Fizzle]

4 hours ago, HeathcliffMontague said:

For what it's worth... Been browsing the forum as FS has crashed on me a lot recently. "Texture overload" seems to do it these days (was pretty stable before).

I have a decent CPU, enough-ish RAM and a fast Internet connection, the GPU is very much my bottleneck (need to update). But I'm on a Win 7 64 bit desktop PC, and I just did a test, visiting my regular places etc. According to Task Manager the LL viewer (latest version) takes up slightly more RAM on average than FS - second latest FS version (about 50 % vs 47 %). But the spikes in RAM usage are much more dramatic in FS. That's after a relatively recent clean FS install. Haven't tried the most recent FS release yet.

Those spikes in RAM usage *seem* (needs more testing) to be related to the crashes.

What happens when you crash?
Does the viewer just poof to desktop & do you get the crash reporter popping up?
Or does the viewer freeze & not recover?
Or is it a disconnect where you get a notification asking you if you want to view IM's or Quit?

Can you past all your system information from Help -> About Firestorm.

[Sasy Scarborough]

On 10/5/2018 at 8:03 AM, Whirly Fizzle said:

Do you have a crazy large inventory?
Each item in your inventory will eat up ~7kb memory.  That can mount up when the inventory is really large.

my calculator does not go that high (whimpers)

[Sasy Scarborough]

I am using a PC so not the same as macbook but I was just wanting to compare because my inventory is a meaty beast.

 

  first picture is at home private island nothing around the sim at all, 256 draw 

  second image is at an event, maxed avatars, 256 draw and my inventory is just under 400 K items, so my memory usage is close to the OPs I think but way different SL's 

Edited January 13, 2019 by Sasy Scarborough

[RachelWales]

On 10/4/2018 at 5:51 PM, ChibiDragon007 said:

So I've been using the latest version of the Firestorm viewer for Second Life since I got back into playing the game. However, I noticed as of late that it has been hogging a pretty hefty chunk of my system memory. A whopping six out of the eight total gb of RAM in my laptop. Before you all scream at me "Get a PC!" I do play on a Macbook Pro, which are not obviously meant for gaming but SL Is the one game I play on it for the most part. I use a late-2016 Macbook Pro w/Touch Bar specifically. 

I don't understand why Firestorm is making my computer use so much of its resources even when I have settings as low as humanly possible for them to go. Only things I have enabled are hardware skinning and avatar cloth so at least my  avatar doesn't look like a blob lmao. 

So what is the solution? Do I change to a different viewer? I've tried a few; Alchemy, the default LL viewer... but  all of them cause heating issues with my laptop and I don't want to risk  frying my system for the sake of being able to play a game. Any  other SL people that use Mac have any advice? I'd much  appreciate it. 

I love Firestorm but you are right, it takes a lot of RAM, about a third more than the Second Life viewer. I increased my RAM by fiddling with some settings but it doesn't help. The only solution I can see is a much more powerful computer.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

Can confirm needing a very power pc for SL.   old hardware bottlenecks badly,  Not much can be done about it because of the content that's in world.

[cheesecurd]

8 hours ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

Can confirm needing a very power pc for SL.   old hardware bottlenecks badly,  Not much can be done about it because of the content that's in world.

SL will run on basically anything, running well is a separate issue. My ancient laptop from 2006 with integrated graphics and 3gb of ram will play SL still.

This is mainly just firestorm bloat. 

[cheesecurd]

It seems i got some reactions out of that statement

but im not joking, proof:

only uses about 700-800mb of memory

firestorm = bloat

(and yes i am upgrading SOON, im very lazy, i ordered a thinkpad x220 for christmas to replace my z61t, going from 2006 to 2011)

[Ansariel Hiller]

And where is the comparison shot of Firestorm at the exact same place with the same settings? 🤔

[Lyssa Greymoon]

Is Firestorm a memory hog? I guess so. That's one of the performance metrics that I don't really care about. Firestorm can use 500MB or 5000MB, I don't care because the only time I'll notice is when I'm looking at the task manager. What I do notice is how fast the viewer runs, and in my experience Firestorm runs noticeably faster on older hardware. Firestorm is all big and fat and using a ton of memory! Yeah, well there's plenty more memory for it, and it's getting 40fps on a $20 ten year old graphics card, what's your point?

[Whirly Fizzle]

2 hours ago, cheesecurd said:

It seems i got some reactions out of that statement

but im not joking, proof:

only uses about 700-800mb of memory

firestorm = bloat

(and yes i am upgrading SOON, im very lazy, i ordered a thinkpad x220 for christmas to replace my z61t, going from 2006 to 2011)

You're running a 32bit viewer here on 32bit Windows, so of course the 32bit viewer is going to use much less RAM.
32-bit programs can only address a maximum of 4GB of memory in a 64-bit OS and can only access 2GB of memory in a 32-bit OS, or 3GB if the program is built using LAA (large address aware).

Another thing to remember about comparing Firestorm 64bit & the LL viewer 64bit viewers is that the LL viewer still limits your texture memory to 512MB.
Firestorm allows texture memory up to 2GB (depending on how much memory your graphics card has available).

For reasons that are over my head (but @Ansariel Hiller can maybe explain in more detail), the higher you have your texture memory set to in the viewer, the more RAM that viewer will use also. The extra memory allowed for texture memory is not only reserved for the texture memory but is also added to the RAM use.
So when comparing FS 64bit to the LL viewer 64bit memory use, you need to limit your FS 64bit texture memory to 512MB or the comparison is meaningless.
You also need to make sure other settings that can affect memory use are the same.
For example: Draw distance, Object LOD factor, graphics quality settings/ALM/shadows etc, whether texture compression is enabled or disabled, whether OpenGL vertex buffer objects is enabled or disabled etc etc.
You also need to use the same avatar to test both viewers because inventory size will affect the amount of memory the viewer uses - each inventory item (where an item is a single asset or a folder) will take up about 7kb of memory.
Inventory size can make a HUGE difference to the amount of memory the viewer (any viewer) uses. For example, when I'm logged in with Whirly, the viewer will use in excess of an extra 1.5GB RAM then when I'm logged in on one of my alts with smaller inventory. That memory difference is solely because of Whirly having a big inventory.

Obviously you also need to be testing memory use in a location that's static with no avatars coming & going & nothing new being rezzed. A few high poly meshes, either worn or rezzed can alter memory use by a LOT.
For example I have some nasty high poly mesh items that when rezzed or worn will gobble an extra 2GB RAM & will outright crash a 32bit viewer with an out of memory crash.
Because of this you need to be wearing the exact same avatar attachments when comparing memory between viewers.

I don't want to be rude but there is a lot of terrible testing & conclusions  being drawn on this thread.

Edited December 15, 2019 by Whirly Fizzle

[cheesecurd]

Ight then, later today I’ll go get 32 bit firestorm and run that there. This is a 32 bit system, it’s not a Core2duo, it’s a Core Duo. 

same settings, same avatar, same location, same view

This thing only has 128mb of video memory, it doesn’t matter what the little slider says.

 

[NiranV Dean]

45 minutes ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

For reasons that are over my head (but @Ansariel Hiller can maybe explain in more detail), the higher you have your texture memory set to in the viewer, the more RAM that viewer will use also. The extra memory allowed for texture memory is not only reserved for the texture memory but is also added to the RAM use.

You basically already explained it yourself why that is.

Anything thats loaded goes into RAM at least once, whether it stays there or not is of course a whole different thing but generally you don't want to toss out anything out of RAM unless you know that it's not going to be used anymore for at least a while, which means you keep stuff in memory to allow it to load much faster than doing it slowly from disk (hence why RAMdisk was so popular). In Second Life the optimal solution would obviously be keeping textures in memory which are on the region you are currently in, thus making sure anything loaded from the region can quickly be accessed even if we unload it from our active memory e.g VRAM where it's used to render stuff. Though we want to keep loading from memory at a minimum still as even that is a huge performance impact. But since this is Second Life and nothing works as it should, stuff is simply loaded into memory and doesn't fully get removed, whether this bloat is textures, meshes, chatlogs or other data or a combination of all of them fully depends on what you do and how much you do it. Ultimately all Viewers will end up as huge memory hog if you give them enough time.

Just today i've ended a 48 hour marathon having my Viewer run day and night in a quite busy place and i ended up at 5.5gb RAM usage. Going anywhere else purged some of it but not even close to half of it, there's always something left.

Also as an interesting side note, since i've got 64gb RAM i've also gotten rid of the page file for Windows, Windows is well known to use it even when not necessary, incurring massive loading times when there is still plenty RAM available that could have been used to shove stuff into memory and speed up said times. Getting rid of the page file forces Windows to load everything into RAM and keep it there, this has significantly improved loading times for everything that i've run at least once. Friends of mine who use SSD's and have been telling me to get one since ages, swear by god that SSDs are absolute king in loading times but i've basically made my loading times near instant, even shooting down their M2 raids easily. They are quite pissed at me that i've turned this waiting game around completely. Hilarious how that goes.

Anyway, 64bit has been the defacto standard since almost 10 years if not longer and RAM was pretty cheap for years, i don't see how a few GB of memory usage is still a topic even today. There are games out there that use much more just to start up than SL uses after 48 hours running straight.

But regardless, i think i doesn't really need any concrete proof, anyone with 2 brain cells can count on his fingers that Firestorm uses more memory than other Viewers, Firestorm has a lot more features, keeps a lot more stuff around and thus obviously bloats a lot more than other Viewers, keeping track of your bathroom routines takes some memory you know.

Edited December 15, 2019 by NiranV Dean

[cheesecurd]

1 hour ago, NiranV Dean said:

RAM was pretty cheap for years, i don't see how a few GB of memory usage is still a topic even today

Being OK with it and justifying it leads to more of it. It’s not about the ram, I could care less that my ram is being used if it was actually being used for anything important.

But if you let yourself be ok with programs that use gigabytes of ram for no reason or for minor performance improvements you would rarely notice then you start to see software get worse and worse with memory over time. Now that ram is cheap and people have a lot of it, very basic programs like office software eat gigabytes of ram.

i can’t even figure out why windows 10 insists on caching absolutely everything and using multiple gigabytes of ram to do effectively the same things as windows 8.1 which uses half of that, or 7 which uses half of that, or xp which uses even less.

Or dear god, office 365. Word using 1gb of ram just to exist. That I will never understand.

What on earth is firestorm doing where it’s putting so much crap into your ram that you are using multiple gigabytes while I’m on 800mb?

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

11 minutes ago, cheesecurd said:

What on earth is firestorm doing where it’s putting so much crap into your ram that you are using multiple gigabytes while I’m on 800mb?

Well, you go to a nice place with about 40 buildings. Each building is mesh with about 8 textured faces, that used to be about 8 x 1024x1024, but since each face now also has displacement maps and specular maps, that's typically 3 x 8 x 1024 x 1024 for one building, so by the time you've got all 40 buildings into your draw distance you've got 40 x 3 x 8 x 1024 x 1024, (which is 1006, 632, 960) and we haven't even started looking at the avatars... And then you go to another place which is trying to be as nice as the first place. Viewers just can't win, unless you do what Niran's suggested.

Edited December 15, 2019 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[Lyssa Greymoon]

14 minutes ago, cheesecurd said:

What on earth is firestorm doing where it’s putting so much crap into your ram that you are using multiple gigabytes while I’m on 800mb?

Wengen Infohub on Firestorm x64 without giving it a 48 hour ***** probe:

That's with a 768MB texture cache, and using only about 120MB more memory than the Linden x64 viewer.

[cheesecurd]

7 hours ago, Ansariel Hiller said:

And where is the comparison shot of Firestorm at the exact same place with the same settings? 🤔

same place, same view, same settings, firestorm, slightly more ram usage

which now leads me to believe, what the hell is wrong with your computers that youre racking up gigabytes?
granted, im an extreme case, running this on a 13 year old laptop with integrated graphics and 3gb of ram, im preeeeeetty certain that i wouldnt be able to hit 1gb of ram usage if i tried, considering i dont have the hardware features to even run some graphical settings regardless of framerate, but im suspecting theres something else going on if youre ever hitting gigabytes of ram usage

even when i had my nice desktop the LL viewer would usually sit at 1.3-1.5gb, and thats maxed graphical settings in places like NCI kuula with lots of people around, firestorm would always hit higher

but i dont have that desktop to test that with the higher settings

when my x220 shows up ill do the same on there and see what it does with a lot more resources to work with and use up

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

Just a thought, if you aren't using ALM maybe the displacement and speculars aren't being downloaded to cache?

[NiranV Dean]

13 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

Well, you go to a nice place with about 40 buildings. Each building is mesh with about 8 textured faces, that used to be about 8 x 1024x1024, but since each face now also has displacement maps and specular maps, that's typically 3 x 8 x 1024 x 1024 for one building, so by the time you've got all 40 buildings into your draw distance you've got 40 x 3 x 8 x 1024 x 1024, (which is 1006, 632, 960) and we haven't even started looking at the avatars... And then you go to another place which is trying to be as nice as the first place. Viewers just can't win, unless you do what Niran's suggested.

Cute. You think that's excessive memory usage. Prepare to see the truth.

This is what people would REALLY use if the Viewer were to not stop and compress textures at all and use lower resolution ones. This is with Full Res textures enabled, everything loads at max resolution, no downscaling. Those ~36 avatars use so much memory that my memory count integer overflowed and rolled back to 0 and is already going up to 1200 and 900mb respectively again. And to give you an idea how much texture memory just one person here uses i've picked someone out and showed their memory usage (234mb on the right, that's a quarter GB just for one person, textures only), we're not even counting the 1 million triangles which consist of several meshes probably a good chunk of memory is going to be wasted for those as well.

Needless to say though that this is the absolute extreme case, it will never happen, ever.

14 hours ago, cheesecurd said:

What on earth is firestorm doing where it’s putting so much crap into your ram that you are using multiple gigabytes while I’m on 800mb?

I'm not using Firestorm and i kinda explained what its doing and why its keeping around so much memory.

Textures, meshes, chatlogs, data, tables, animations, sounds all that stuff as well as space for the Viewer to work and live in. 2 to 4GB memory usage is absolutely normal for any Viewer in places with at least some avatars around. Sure that's a lot of memory for basicallly nothing but that's thanks to all the unoptimize crap everywhere. So... here we go again we did a full circle once more. No matter where we go, no matter the topic we'll always end up at the "content is unoptimized" discussion because it's the root of all evil.

 

Btw, i disabled full res textures and left the place, here's what the Viewer went down to again, still leaving a good 800mb bloat.

Edited December 16, 2019 by NiranV Dean