Win 7 64 bit, 4.5 GB of RAM - still not enough?

[Building Shabby Dwellings]

Hi all; I bought "Cities: Skylines" yesterday and like it a lot - that is, I *would* like it a lot if it weren't that prone to crashes on my system. I have a Windows 7 64 bit system and 4.5 GB of RAM, so the system requirements should be met. However, after playing for a few hours, this is my experience:

- After a while, Windows messages start to appear, telling me that Cities is using too much memory and should be closed. If I ignore them, I can continue playing and the game still runs smoothly. However, it happened several times that it crashed exactly when I was trying to save the game. There must be a spike of memory usage or the like when you're trying to save, as the game crashes exactly after opening the save window, which is quite frustrating, as progress gets lost... By the way, I wished for an autosave feature, which doesn't seem to be available. - Still, according to the Windows task manager, the available memory isn't quite used up.

So, any hints? Are there ways to reduce memory usage of CS? We don't have to discuss other applications, I think; I don't have anything remotely memory-hungry running when I play the game. Oh, and I'm not using any mods.

(Edit: Seems I should have posted this to the "Support and Bug Reports" forum, so maybe a moderator can move this thread appropriately...?)

 

[NZSimplicity]

I am not an expert, but 4.5 ram is not enough, remember that windows 7 uses approx 1GB or more of ram itself, which would only leave you around 3.5 for skylines assuming that you have other programs turned off.
I usually use 4GB -5GB of ram when playing slylines, but I do have a lot of mods and assets installed.
If you haven't already go here - http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri - and see what it says

 

[Fspiders]

Make sure your pagesys file is set to " system managed " or increase it. It wont make your game faster but you'll not get the memory or save problem as much

 

[Building Shabby Dwellings]

I am not an expert, but 4.5 ram is not enough

Well, the official system requirements of the game say "4 GB" as a minimum. So, it should work (well, it works, and even smoothly - until it crashes) with 4.5, I'd say, which is even a bit more than the official minimum.

 

[Building Shabby Dwellings]

Make sure your pagesys file is set to " system managed " or increase it. It wont make your game faster but you'll not get the memory or save problem as much

Thanks, that might prove to be a useful hint... I notice that it was set to a fixed 200 MB, which is probably not enough at all. I'll set it now to system managed, let's see what happens

 

[Ri0Rdian]

4.5 GB of RAM? How did you even get to such a weird number? Got 2x2 GB +512 MB? Or a single 4 GB stick + 512 MB one? I started my PC life with a PC that had 32 MB of RAM and I felt really good by upgrading to 96 MB...yay GTA III! (but that number was way easier to achieve in that age than yours is today).

 

[Building Shabby Dwellings]

Well, I'm happy to report that Fspiders hit the nail on the head with his hint - after setting the Windows page file size to "system managed", the Windows error messages stopped as well as the crashes, the game is running perfectly now

4.5 GB of RAM? How did you even get to such a weird number? Got 2x2 GB +512 MB? Or a single 4 GB stick + 512 MB one? I started my PC life with a PC that had 32 MB of RAM and I felt really good by upgrading to 96 MB...yay GTA III! (but that number was way easier to achieve in that age than yours is today).

I think it's 4 + 512, yes... upgraded a while ago. Works fine - and now with CS as well

Oh, and *I* started my PC life with a PC that had 640 KB of RAM, and before that, I used a Commodore 64 - which I still own, by the way

 

[Fspiders]

Glad to be of help... Probably 90% of the low memory and crash on save problems in CS are due to pagesys settings.

 

[Tropod]

My PC has 8GB of ram, but I'm finding my CPU is a bottleneck. As such I'm upgrading it; core 2 duo -> core 2 quad. Best I can do without replacing mobo & everything else .

 

[deadbeaver]

Got an overclocked e5450/gtx750/6gb/win7 setup and was playing until yesterday with only 4gb of memory. Adding two gbs of more memory really made a difference.
Also, I had some troubles earlier with low pagesys, game kept crashing once in awhile. Now with more memory and pagesys up to the recommended 9gb
it's like a different game, really smooth.

 

[KnightHawkTFC]

Well, I'm happy to report that Fspiders hit the nail on the head with his hint - after setting the Windows page file size to "system managed", the Windows error messages stopped as well as the crashes, the game is running perfectly now

I think it's 4 + 512, yes... upgraded a while ago. Works fine - and now with CS as well

Oh, and *I* started my PC life with a PC that had 640 KB of RAM, and before that, I used a Commodore 64 - which I still own, by the way

I doubt you just added 512 to a system, that would be very odd number\combo of sticks. You probably have 6gb with 1.5 being stolen by a video card in 'shared' memory.

C64... those were days, your showing your age, I never owned a C64, my neighbor did I played with it though and he on my IBMpcJr (128kb vs 64k on the Commadore), made him jealous when I was rocking the ms flight sim 1.0 first before it was backported for the C64, still amazes me even with the crappy graphics (in retrospect) that the game fit on two 5 1/2's.

 

[Ri0Rdian]

Game indeed seems to love RAM, I believe even having more than 8 might be beneficial in some cases.

 

[JimmiG]

As long as you don't download too many custom assets, and you keep background tasks to a minimum, 4GB (or 4.5) should be enough. However you might get some stuttering when panning around. As soon as you start adding assets, memory usage skyrockets, and even 8GB might not be enough.

 

[V10lator]

My PC has 8GB of ram, but I'm finding my CPU is a bottleneck. As such I'm upgrading it; core 2 duo -> core 2 quad. Best I can do without replacing mobo & everything else .

Are you sure it's the CPU? The game ate almost 8 GB RAM for me which slowed down everything even when the system wasn't swapping (linux, it's around the same as pagesys). Upgraded to 16 GB and everything is like a charm now. This leaves me to believe even when the system isn't swapping to the hard drive it still does a lot of calculations while trying to fill the memory optimally (huge pages vs. normal pages and so on) and as a result it might look as the CPU is at its knees. BTW: The slow-down happened when hitting around 6 to 7 GB (can't remember the exact number, but before it was a real "low memory" situation).

//EDIT: This is my system running with the browser (many, many tabs) and a few minor apps like steam, a text editor and so on running:

  total  used  free  shared  buffers  cached
Mem:  15G  13G  2,4G  467M  270M  5,1G
-/+ buffers/cache:  7,9G  7,7G
Swap:  4,0G  23M  4,0G

As you can see 13 GB are used so you might wonder how the exact same system could run with just 8 GB of RAM in the past. Well, it's simple: Around 8 GB are used for hard drive caching only (leaving around 5 GB of real used memory as the caches can be removed at any time if memory is needed but they speed up the whole desktop experience). So a RAM upgrade is something really sweet.

 

[Building Shabby Dwellings]

I doubt you just added 512 to a system, that would be very odd number\combo of sticks. You probably have 6gb with 1.5 being stolen by a video card in 'shared' memory.

Well, as it seems to be of interest to you, I checked to refresh my own weak memory - so, my 4.5 GB consist of DDR2 RAM (PC2-6400) in four memory slots: two with 1024 MB each, one with 2048, and one - with 512 MB, indeed. I probably started out with four 512 MB sticks (this was formerly a computer with Windows Vista 32 bit) and there's now just one left after upgrades.

My video card, a Radeon HD 7700 with 1 GB of RAM, doesn't use any shared memory.

 

[Tropod]

@V10lator yeah pretty sure. When playing game currently only using about 2.5-3GB ram. In a few weeks I'll know for sure, when my new CPU arrives in mail .

 

[KnightHawkTFC]

Well, as it seems to be of interest to you, I checked to refresh my own weak memory - so, my 4.5 GB consist of DDR2 RAM (PC2-6400) in four memory slots: two with 1024 MB each, one with 2048, and one - with 512 MB, indeed. I probably started out with four 512 MB sticks (this was formerly a computer with Windows Vista 32 bit) and there's now just one left after upgrades.

My video card, a Radeon HD 7700 with 1 GB of RAM, doesn't use any shared memory.

Well not really of interest per say but yeah it does confirm a rather a-typical configuration. Now go fill up that last slot, your system will thank you.

 

[fleitner]

In the past I had a similar system with different memory modules (both different capacity as well as different brand). It generally worked fine, but I experienced some unexplainable crashes from time to time. All modules worked fine together, even memtest did not find anything wrong with them.

However, when I switched the memory to two identical modules the occasional crashes disappeared. I never found out whether it was because of the higher amount of RAM after the upgrade or some glitches between the different modules before.

And yes, C:S is quite memory hungry, some days ago I saw a memory usage of more than 10GB for the first time

 

[TotalyMoo]

Are you running a browser, or such, whilst playing? 4GB RAM is minimum for the game so if you're using, say, Chrome at the same time you'll have problems

 

[Building Shabby Dwellings]

Are you running a browser, or such, whilst playing? 4GB RAM is minimum for the game so if you're using, say, Chrome at the same time you'll have problems

Well, as said above, Fspiders' hint to set the Windows page file size to "system managed" solved the issue, the game is running perfectly now, didn't have a single crash since changing this, no memory issues anymore. So no need to look for causes - "case closed", one could say, still appreciate it - But no, I don't have a browser running whilst playing.