Holy memory leak, Batman? (Ep. 2x01)

[Tyraa Rane]

Uhhhhh...something tells me Ice Station Santa shouldn't be using this much memory:





I first noticed the problem when the game was lagging horribly after a couple hours of gameplay--I went into the task manager and found out it was using over 900MB of RAM. I saved the game, quit, and rebooted--everything was fine. But I kept an eye on the memory usage, and it kept increasing, especially when I'd move to a different area in the game (ex., going from the neighborhood to the North Pole sometimes caused jumps in memory of over 100MB). When it got back up to 900+MB again, the lag kicked back in--I switched to a lower, non-widescreen resolution (1024x768; earlier I was playing at 1280x720) and the lag resolved, but the memory usage definitely didn't! I let it run for a little while longer, and the picture above is what resulted.

For what it's worth, I do play in windowed mode, and do have some tasks running in the background (IM client, Firefox, etc.) because I'm a horrible multi-tasker, but they've never given me any trouble with Sam & Max (or any other game, for that matter) before.

And if it helps at all, my computer stats are:

Windows XP SP2
Pentium IV 3.2Ghz (w/hyper-threading)
2GB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon X600 (256MB RAM)

[Maratanos]

First off: does each leap to a location add significant memory usage, or only the first time you visit a node?

If it's as I suspect, and only a new node, then I know your problem.

See here.

Apparently their memory manager has some problems and doesn't reclaim memory enough. It's not really a leak, per se, it's just that it's not ever really unloading anything from memory.

I'll leave it up to Telltale to say more.

[Tyraa Rane]

Originally Posted by Maratanos

First off: does each leap to a location add significant memory usage, or only the first time you visit a node?

If it's as I suspect, and only a new node, then I know your problem.

Hmm. I'm working from memory here (...har), but it does seem like visiting new nodes causes the most significant jumps in memory usage--or if I haven't visited a node in quite a while. Basically, the longer it takes to load a node, the more memory the game bites off.

Cutscenes and nodes where there's a lot going on in the background seem to eat up more memory, too, which only makes sense--the problem is that it's not letting go of the memory once it's used it.

Edit: Okay, I just checked now (and finished the game)--it's definitely a problem with loading new nodes. Stinky's Diner and Santa's Workshop seem to be the worst offenders; loading Santa's Workshop for the first time (in this period of gameplay) resulted in a jump of almost 200MB in memory usage. However, revisiting nodes also causes memory hoggage...only in considerably smaller amounts, say 10 - 50MB or so.

Also, I swear the problem gets progressively worse as the game goes on. This time, I only got about half an hour of gameplay in before the game had eaten up 900MB+ of memory and I started having lag issues.

[Mel]

Originally Posted by Tyraa Rane

And if it helps at all, my computer stats are:

Windows XP SP2
Pentium IV 3.2Ghz (w/hyper-threading)
2GB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon X600 (256MB RAM)

I have a laptop with that exact same video card (except it's 128 MB) and a 2.8 GHz Pentium IV (I have less RAM than you). My problem was massive choppiness after a bit of playing and it was especially bad for me when I went to the North Pole and into Santa's workshop. They may be entirely different things. But I never checked the memory usage so who knows?

That probably doesn't help but your computer specs really leapt out at me (as they're somewhat similar to mine).

[Tyraa Rane]

Originally Posted by Mel

I have a laptop with that exact same video card (except it's 128 MB) and a 2.8 GHz Pentium IV (I have less RAM than you). My problem was massive choppiness after a bit of playing and it was especially bad for me when I went to the North Pole and into Santa's workshop. They may be entirely different things. But I never checked the memory usage so who knows?

It could be the memory issue...I think Santa's Workshop causes the huge jump in memory use just because there's so much going on there (the toy plane moving around overhead, like that). Same with Stinky's Diner--lots of things and people to examine/interact with.

I don't remember having a big problem with the North Pole exterior, but it would get laggy if memory use was already sky-high. Maybe you could try and recreate the problem and then check on memory use? I'm willing to bet we've got the same problem.

[Phoenix]

I've had this problem too. I've also had it throughout the whole of Season 1. But it wasn't as troublesome as in Ice Station Santa. Ice Station Santa is so frustratingly laggy after entering several locations that there's absolutely no fun in playing it.

I do have a bit of a low end computer, but even if I had a better computer, no game should take up a Gig of memory.

Pentium IV 2Ghz
ATi Radeon 9600XT (128mb)
512mb RAM

I really hope this issue will get resolved.

[Emily]

Some chugging issues have been resolved in 202. When that comes out, anyone who had trouble with 201, please let us know if it's better!

[bsplay]

I'm having the same problem. I have 2gigs of RAM and the game is using 1.

[Guybrush Threepwood]

Just popping in to tell you how awesome this thread title is.

[lpsavoie]

Same problem here, I had the same problem with season 1, but now it's a lot worse !

Athlon XP 2500+
512mb of RAM
Geforce4 MX440 graphics card
Asus A7V8X-X motherboard
Windows XP SP2 french

[Molokov]

I've experienced the memory hoggage too - throughout Season 1 and now with 201.

However, I did have to manually kill the 201 process a few times when I had fullscreen mode on and picked a bad resolution - no way to undo it!

Played in window mode (non-fullscreen) after that at a better resolution and it was fine. When the game got laggy due to too much memory usage, a save/quit/reload was good.

Hoping that the memory allocation/freeing used in future episodes is better!

[Phoenix]

Originally Posted by Emily

Some chugging issues have been resolved in 202. When that comes out, anyone who had trouble with 201, please let us know if it's better!

Just wanted to let you know that it finally works! Yay! The size of 201 made it near impossible to play with the memory leak (Season 1 was still playable), but with the awesome new episode, I can finally wander around aimlessly again without worrying about filling up my memory!