A big reason for poor performance: memory leak

[durbal]

While in a marathon session today I noticed the game got almost unplayably slow and it made little sense since the world state had not changed much besides my tag growing. So naturally I wondered...was there a memory leak to cause performance to dip so much? I close the game and re-open it and the game is at least twice as fast.

I haven't heard anyone mention this, so figured I'd point it out to the community and the devs. If you notice the game is going extra slow, exit the game and go back in and see how much different performance is and share your experience.

 

[MatthewP]

I’ve noticed this type of reload speed up occasionally for years. As for the memory leak:

1) Did you check memory usage? If your machine wasn’t very low on memory then a memory leak shouldn’t cause that much slowdown. I ask because a memory leak is a pretty specific thing. From what you’ve said so far, the possible causes seem broader: there’s something, or multiple things, about the state of the game when it’s been running for a while that sometimes slow it down versus a clean reload. For example maybe the AI gets into some expensive logic loops, or certain calculations get run even though they don’t need to be.

2) Whether or not there is a memory leak, I’d guess a memory dump of the game would be very useful. Save files probably are not since it won’t repro. I wonder if crashing your game next time and sending the error report from that dialog creates a memory dump? Maybe some dev knows.

 

[PDXJon]

While in a marathon session today I noticed the game got almost unplayably slow and it made little sense since the world state had not changed much besides my tag growing. So naturally I wondered...was there a memory leak to cause performance to dip so much? I close the game and re-open it and the game is at least twice as fast.

I haven't heard anyone mention this, so figured I'd point it out to the community and the devs. If you notice the game is going extra slow, exit the game and go back in and see how much different performance is and share your experience.

I leave my game running all day. It’ll sit paused(monitor off) when I’m not playing. I’ve even forgotten that it was on and it sat there over night. I noticed maybe one or two times where the game slowed down. I just assumed some background utility started taking over the resources. I think the slowdown would be more common if there was memory leak issues. Memory leak is a game issue and not a PC one, right?

 

[durbal]

I leave my game running all day. It’ll sit paused(monitor off) when I’m not playing. I’ve even forgotten that it was on and it sat there over night. I noticed maybe one or two times where the game slowed down. I just assumed some background utility started taking over the resources. I think the slowdown would be more common if there was memory leak issues. Memory leak is a game issue and not a PC one, right?

Yeah, memory leaks are application issues. That also means that simply having it paused won't necessarily unused resources in memory to be disposed of, but certain actions will allocate rssources which are never cleaned up when they go unused (that's the leak).

 

[Manwe_Sulimo]

I leave my game running all day. It’ll sit paused(monitor off) when I’m not playing. I’ve even forgotten that it was on and it sat there over night. I noticed maybe one or two times where the game slowed down. I just assumed some background utility started taking over the resources. I think the slowdown would be more common if there was memory leak issues. Memory leak is a game issue and not a PC one, right?

This is a bit off-topic and of course I am not sure how much resources it costs when just running in the background and paused, but wouldn't it save energy to close the game when you don't play it? Assuming you at least turn off the computer when you don't use it ;-)

 

[PDXJon]

This is a bit off-topic and of course I am not sure how much resources it costs when just running in the background and paused, but wouldn't it save energy to close the game when you don't play it? Assuming you at least turn off the computer when you don't use it ;-)

I’m not sure what the difference in energy consumption would be between leaving the system idle or turning it on/off throughout the day. I hurt my back in a train wreck, so I need to take breaks from sitting. My intent is to go back to playing, but sometimes I get distracted and forget. It happens more often than I want to admit. I‘m curious how much juice is used at idle.

 

[Lightbanee]

There is definitely a problem with the game, I had a planetary empire so things were getting pretty slow, when I turned my computer on the next day to continue it was suddenly much faster. But it does seem like the only fix if while irritating is just simply terminating the game completely and fresh restarting.