XP32 3Gb Switch

[bumpinthenight]

Hi, if it was limiting itself to only 1.4 gigs of memory there's something else at play here...

1) What metric were you using to give you that figure (program and exact name)

2) Do you have sp1 installed?

Task manager, which I know isn't a precise tool but meh I don't have any developer tools for windows installed. I took an unedited copy of the executable and ran it just to confim. I found a border skirmish between the paranid and argon, here's a screen cap of task manager a few moments after the first of those pausing hud reloaders hits:
[ external image ]

For what its worth I quit/loaded using the uncapped exe and went to the same skirmish, ram hit about 2.3 at its peak but no pausing hud/reloading occured.

I was originally curious as to why 1.4 was the magic number instead of close to 2.1, googling gave me a few situations where developers (especially with .net) were complaining that their allocs were failing after the 1.4 mark and others were talking about how some memory management methods actually have such horrible overhead by that point that the other 600megs is purely devoted to mapping the rest. While unlikely I left it at that for plausibility. The evidence was clear enough to me, once I'd changed the flag TC's ram usage went up but the cache-flushing pauses ceased as well.

Oh and of course SP1 is installed, how would that have impacted things any ways?

[pjknibbs]

Oh and of course SP1 is installed, how would that have impacted things any ways?

There was a bug in Vista prior to SP1 whereby the entire RAM on your graphics card was mapped into your process's address space, thus leaving less room for other stuff.

[frymaster]

I restored the original .exe the other night and had a fly around... Peak Working Set hit about 1.8 gigs for me (private working set and working set are pretty much identical for me) with virtual size (which isn't listed on task manager, I had to use process explorer) being around 2000 megabytes.

This stayed pretty much constant until I jumped out, at which point virtual size drops to 1.3 gig and slowly works its way back up, until I jump in. Working set lags behind (naturally) but not by much.

When LAA is set on the exe, there's no drop in used memory when I change sector. The implication is, it's trying to load stuff for the new sector, it knows there's no memory left (or it actually tries, and traps the "couldn't allocate" error), so it releases memory being used by other game resources. In your case, it seems to hit out of memory, for whatever reason, sooner, and ends up unloading the HUD. (This is all supposition, of course)

Can you confirm for me:

- That woking set is pretty much the same size as private working set
- If you can, use process explorer and see how virtual size relates to them
- Private bytes might be worth a check too

For the benefit of anyone going "huh?":

- Memory the game can access is called "virtual memory", and has no relationship to actual RAM at all.
- The virtual memory of the game that's currently resident in RAM is called the working set
- Private memory belongs to the game and only the game; exceptions could be things like shared system libraries

Basically if the virtual size never goes above 1.4 / 1.5 gigs for you, then it's definately a game bug... if it _is_ topping out at for-all-intents-and-purposes-2-gigs, then there's something else going on, that needs either a change at your end, or a change in the way the game works on certain systems.

Does this sound plausible?

[bumpinthenight]

Aye sounds good, can't try it out at the moment but I'll bookmark and post back when I can, likely within 24 hours.

[Kapakio]

Well, I just tried the 3Gb in my Vista 32 bits and it didn't help. In fact it got worse, after a couple of hours playing, I jumped to Legend's Home and all of a sudden the frame rate came to about 6 secs per frame!!! I noticed before quitting the game that X3TC.exe was using about 2.6 gigs of RAM. So yes, it increase the memory usage, but apparently is not the solution.

[bumpinthenight]

Okie Frymaster I've done the experiments, btw I found I could without fail trigger the pausing/hud reloading by jumping to sector M148 with the unmodded exe, I haven't done the quests associated with it so its still filled with a variety of race's ships. Didn't even need combat and also that pretty much rules out combat sounds being the source at least for me too. It btw takes 10-15 seconds for the jump from another sector into M148 with the unmodded exe, meanwhile the modded one slides right in like it was just any other jump and at that not even a single stutter as a travelled into it.

Here's the unmodded exe's memory results:
[ external image ]

Here's the modded one's:
[ external image ]

I'm not sure how to interpret the lack of data for the modded one with Process explorer, maybe part of how the >2gb flag works? I'm thinking unmodded's one's working vs peak working are due to I alt-tabbed out of the constant pausing right after one of those pauses and it hadn't been able to fill it up yet...or something, not sure. Both these were taken pretty much a minute into flying from the north gate of M148 southward.