[8.00 HF3] Memory Leak causing CTD - At least one usecase fixed in 8.00 HF4.

[chaoscell]

Howdy,

I would like to add my experience to this post, as I have been encountering similar instability. I had significant trouble completing the section where you have to traverse the Apotheosis maze (the quests where you have to use the spacesuit are a horrible experience, in an otherwise excellent game), as my game crashed to desktop twice. Both before and after that event, I have also suffered memory-related crashes during large battles.

However, the behavior seems somewhat inconsistent. Yesterday, I had the game running for about 10 hours straight, including participation in large battles, and it did not crash at any point. It was a bit sluggish during combat, and the stuttering is always annoying when trying to aim, but the game remained stable.

This is a major problem for me because I tend to play with a video running in the background. Browser tabs usually consume around 1-2 GB of RAM, but lately, I have had to stop multitasking entirely given the memory problems the game (or my pc) causes. I have not experienced this specific behavior with any other video game.

My specs:

SYSTEM_OS Windows 10 Home 64 bits
SYSTEM_CPU AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 6-Core Processor  (12 CPUs), ~3.8GHz
SYSTEM_CORE_NUM SYSTEM_CORE_LOGIC 12  SYSTEM_CORE_PHYSICS 6
SYSTEM_MEMORY 16334.781MB
SYSTEM_VIRTUAL_MEMORY 134217727.875MB
SYSTEM_PAGE_FILE 57294.781MB
SYSTEM_DIRECTX_VERSION DirectX 12
GRAPHICS \\.\DISPLAY1 AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
GRAPHICS_CHIP AMD Radeon Graphics Processor (0x73DF)
GRAPHICS_VRAM 12243.227 MB
GRAPHICS_SHARED_VRAM 8167.391 MB
GRAPHICS_DISPLAY_MODE 1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (144Hz)

[Triceracops]

I've specifically created an account here to reply to this exact issue. I only recently updated to 8.X after playing 7.6 for months with zero issue.

As soon as I started a game in 8.1 and got into a heavy combat zone, I began experiencing crashes. Realized that memory consumption for X4 was peaking at 25-26GB physical memory.

This is absurd, and I hope someone in the dev team is actually looking into this as the community I am apart of has been reporting many issues with crashes and stuttering with the latest update that seem to be related to this memory leak.

[CBJ]

We've issued a hotfix which we believe could address this issue. Any feedback on whether it has improved the situation for you would be very welcome.

Please note that there may still be a separate issue with a memory leak in certain Linux graphics driver versions, which is not addressed by this hotfix and cannot be as it's outside our control.

[[SQ]Noname]

Gave it a try quickly with the Windows build (590967) on Linux - it seems it still leaks memory, although somewhat more slowly (about 2 GB in 30 min. as opposed to 3 GB before).

Specs:
Linux Mint 22.1
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D
NVidia RTX3060 (12 GB)
16 GB DDR4 RAM

[ninchuka]

nearly 6 and a half hours of interworlds and only 11GB of ram used on linux and other users on the SWI discord testing in a big fight report it as fixed, so great work

[Alan Phipps]

So now the devs would need to know the technical differences between the situations, systems, softwares and settings of [SQ]Noname and ninchuka to explain the why their usecases are different and have different outcomes from using the fix.

[[SQ]Noname]

Please note that there may still be a separate issue with a memory leak in certain Linux graphics driver versions, which is not addressed by this hotfix and cannot be as it's outside our control.

Care to share more details about what drivers are affected, and why it would affect only your game and not others?

[[SQ]Noname]

So now the devs would need to know the technical differences between the situations, systems, softwares and settings of [SQ]Noname and ninchuka to explain the why their usecases are different and have different outcomes from using the fix.

Well, I haven't tried the Linux build yet, and I might use an older graphics driver, but that's never caused any issue so far. That's why I would be interested in having more details about what CBJ mentioned.

Thanks for adressing this so quickly in any case!

[ColdRogue26]

I have also tried 8.0 again for a few hours, my X4 RAM usage never surpasses 8 GB with all but the envoy DLC.
Fixed in my eyes, thanks!

[Shadow_rainbow]

We've issued a hotfix which we believe could address this issue. Any feedback on whether it has improved the situation for you would be very welcome.

Please note that there may still be a separate issue with a memory leak in certain Linux graphics driver versions, which is not addressed by this hotfix and cannot be as it's outside our control.

Can confirm memory leak. Found this thread when started to look up what's wrong.
Windows 10, 32GB RAM. Dixdiag: https://TransFiles.ru/iedg1
X4 8.0 Hotfix 3 with a few minor mods.
Dump unavailable -- when I tried to capture error message, the whole OS crashed to reboot. Dump was not saved.
I was quietly hanging in Tharka's Cascade 15 in Envoy, shooting from time to time at Asgard from double shotguns to eject the crew, watching the show on second screen while watching memory consumption rising slowly. My Behemoth and Syn were closer to the far gate, eliminating stream of spaceplanes with Flak cannons, Shuyaku Vanguard was floating nearby with marines. Reloaded once when K jumped within range (I have died from its escorts trying to protect Asgard). On reload, memory consumption dipped a little, but then kept rising.
The whole 'flood' took around 1 hour and some 10-15 minutes from game start to crash.

debug.txt content as follows:

Spoiler

Show

Code: Select all

Logfile started, time Sat Jan 10 08:36:46 2026
[General] 0.00 'NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti' NVIDIA v591.44.0 (Vulkan 1.4.325) check=1
[Init   ] 0.00 Entering startmenu in 8.00 (580735)
[Init   ] 1.19 Game initialisation time until intro video: 19 seconds
[Init   ] 0.00 Loading saved game 'quicksave', first pass
[Init   ] 0.00 - Saved in 8.00 (580735), game time = 6d 21h 57m, gamestart 'x4ep1_gamestart_terran1' started in 7.50 (553255)
[Init   ] 0.00 - MODIFIED: At some point, the game was running with modified game files (modified=1)
[Init   ] 597441.51 Loading saved game 'quicksave', second pass
[General] 599195.45 ======================================
[=ERROR=] 599195.45 aicontext<order.fight.escort,0x21fd7a8>: squadron attack case unaccounted for. this ship will just stay in formation.
event.name: event_object_attacked
my assignment: Defence
in escort group: null
[General] 599195.45 ======================================
[Init   ] 0.00 Loading saved game 'quicksave', first pass
[Init   ] 0.00 - Saved in 8.00 (580735), game time = 6d 22h 49m, gamestart 'x4ep1_gamestart_terran1' started in 7.50 (553255)
[Init   ] 0.00 - MODIFIED: At some point, the game was running with modified game files (modified=1)
[Init   ] 600594.58 Loading saved game 'quicksave', second pass
[General] 600803.45 ======================================
[=ERROR=] 600803.45 PANIC: SMem::Allocate() failed allocating 90871552 bytes - error: Not enough space
[General] 600803.45 ======================================

Prior to this experienced similar crashes in Hatikvah's Choice.

[CBJ]

If you're still on 8.00 Hotfix 3 then you don't have the fix for the memory leak anyway. And I'm afraid with mods installed, no matter how "minor", we have no way of knowing whether the mods are causing separate issues, so we cannot spend time looking into that.

[Shadow_rainbow]

If you're still on 8.00 Hotfix 3 then you don't have the fix for the memory leak anyway. And I'm afraid with mods installed, no matter how "minor", we have no way of knowing whether the mods are causing separate issues, so we cannot spend time looking into that.

Oh. Thought that was concerning HF3. I have just updated to Hotfix 4, played ~20 minutes and didn't see growing memory allocation (with HF3 it would have grown by several GB already). Looks like it fixed it for me, at least as far as I can tell.

Sorry for the false alarm.

/EDIT 1 hour later, X4 still takes up 9.6GB. Looks like it's fixed, but I'll keep an eye on it.

[Joe Mantis]

Hello, it seems that I'm also getting the same issue with an apparent memory leak, monitoring system memory I can see the game process keeps allocating more and more over time, eventually taking all free memory and either crashing or the os terminates it

5800X3D, 32GB ram
AMD 7900XT
cachyos linux

running the X4 linux native branch on steam

seems to reliably happen when continuously playing in-sector with a large long lasting battle

Just wanted to report back that in my case the hotfix worked, and give thanks to the devs for all you do!

[chaoscell]

We've issued a hotfix which we believe could address this issue. Any feedback on whether it has improved the situation for you would be very welcome.

Please note that there may still be a separate issue with a memory leak in certain Linux graphics driver versions, which is not addressed by this hotfix and cannot be as it's outside our control.

Thanks!!!! It works now.

[[SQ]Noname]

So now the devs would need to know the technical differences between the situations, systems, softwares and settings of [SQ]Noname and ninchuka to explain the why their usecases are different and have different outcomes from using the fix.

Well, I haven't tried the Linux build yet, and I might use an older graphics driver, but that's never caused any issue so far. That's why I would be interested in having more details about what CBJ mentioned.

Thanks for adressing this so quickly in any case!

So, the Windows build on my Linux system still leaks RAM, although it seems to slow down a little over time as opposed to HF3. But after a good hour or so it has still gained ~3 GB at which point it is too much for my 16GB system.

Switched over to the Linux build, and this one is much less leaky...only increases RAM by about 0.3 GB per hour. I only let it run for one hour though, so maybe it stabilises enough to remain playable for longer sessions.

[UserGuy123]

Still having probelms. Lasts longer but still crashes

[Alan Phipps]

'Me too' or 'Still happening' posts with no further information or evidence for investigation really don't help.

[UserGuy123]

Its still happening but its lasting longer than before. Here is the crash report from my computer: for some reason the game isnt making crash reports.

https://limewire.com/d/rbJPr#AhWQMgEFYm

It's still of note that this issue has still only really happened with this game and one other. I'm having a problem with ARC Raiders as well, but I think that's a separate issue. Happy to help however I can.

[Commissar0617]

im getting this error still. particularly is a very busy system.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachment ... y=lossless
hardware:
https://i.imgur.com/ZfEsJCt.png

It doesn't appear to have actually used all my ram, so maybe it's trying to mis-allocate or some such. likewise, plenty of free vram and drive space.

DMP files:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ailm6F ... drive_link, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ByWMjo ... drive_link

[CBJ]

Your system information is not visible because Imgur is not accessible where I am, and your Google Drive files are not public.