Dayz and memory usage, please explain ?

[Hetstaine 10852]

I find opening a ton of web pages or running a few programs in the background whilst playing dayz somehow forces less memory usage. What am i not getting here ?

This is after a few days of constant task manager monitoring. I did a whole lot of other screen grabs but these two are enough to show what i mean, and it is consistent every time.

edit : If i leave the game to run it slowly climbs to the point where i get a ctd and memory usage is about 2.70-2.90gb (windows uses 750mb on my pc and i am only 4gb ram) the game is still in background and i can tab into it and hear and move but i am looking at my desktop.

Never had this in the SA until the latest patch and now it happens every session i play.

Edited April 26, 2014 by Hetstaine

[kichilron 8550]

Who has 3.5 GB RAM?  :huh:

 

But anyway - is it possible that due to your overall rather little amount of RAM DayZ gets less memory allocated when you open new tabs on your browser - the browser get more, but doesn't actually use it at the time?

[Hetstaine 10852]

I have no idea, that's why i posted :) I am win32 bit so only 4gb ram and using the 3g switch which forces windows to use 1gb for kernel instead of 2 thus freeing 3gb for other applications. Normally it is split 2/2 on 32bit.

The thing that i am wondering about is why does dayz drop so much in memory usage and run perfectly fine but then slowly creep back up to the point of crashing ?

Here is some more pics i did last night in a decent session which show from the start of the game and how even a single zed can spike and affect memory usage.

 

Related pic series with notes

If you see when i was 12 minutes into game i was using 2.54-6gb , after opening a bunch of tabs, fraps and photoscape and then closing the tabs i jumped down to 2.16gb of usage for quite some time until it slowly crept up. On a system with only 4gb ram from that is quite a jump. And like i said, i have had nearly no crashes with the SA, until this patch, which are now frequent.

[terminal_boy 860]

Who has 3.5 GB RAM?  :huh:

People running 32 bit installs of Windows.

If both DayZ and system tasks are asking for more than the 3.5GB available, one of them is going to loose out.

Alas, your only solution is to install 64 bit OS and upgrade to 8GB of RAM. Unless you do lots of video encoding, 8GB is plenty.

[kichilron 8550]

Alas, your only solution is to install 64 bit OS and upgrade to 8GB of RAM. Unless you do lots of video encoding, 8GB is plenty.

 

 

Sorry, I mave have been a bit ignorant there, completely forgetting about the possibility of 32bit.

 

But these days you need to use 64 bit for almost everything anyway, which is why I assumed Het has that.

 

 

I am honestly thinking about upgrading to 16GB at the moment, even thought I don't do much in regards of Video-Rendering. I do however have about 3 Browsers with a million tabs open - plus the other usual things one needs day in, day out.

 

Get yourself that 64bit, Het.

 

If it's about them monies - just start selling yourself for an appropriate price to Steak. You've been offering your "services" for free long enough.

Edited April 26, 2014 by kichilron

[Ken Bean 175]

@Hetstaine
This most likely has sth to do with garbage collection.

It depends on how programs work and utilise the RAM.

Pointer, references and stuff are "created on the fly" while a program is running. They get their address in RAM and they stay there until they get "destroyed" e.g. by a garbage collector. That's why the used RAM usually tends to "built up" until it's beeing freed again. When this happens depends on many factors and the garbage collector usually kind of comes when there's time.

Edited April 26, 2014 by Ken Bean