Memory util. issues causing PC and keyboard freezes.

yellow51 ●

Hey there.

Not a dev, but, if you're good with it, feel free to upload your save that this is occurring in. It might aid the Devs, and the tinkerer in me is also interested to take a peek and see what could be the issue.

A quick question, because I'm either blind, or I'm not seeing it in the logs - do you have trash removal enabled (world cleanup, basically)?

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Evan Korling ●

It's not isolated to any 1 save, unfortunately, just the game in general, and the saves I use more frequently have a number of grids I'd rather not just release out on a forum in a worldfile. Trash cleanup is something I don't think I've ever touched the settings for, so it's set to whatever the default for saves are.

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Ondrej Borz ●

Hello Engineer,

Thank you for reaching out on our forum regarding this issue.

We have reviewed the logs you provided. Unfortunately, they do not indicate the cause of the reported freezes. We also noticed that the logs were captured while the game was running with Pulsar and additional client-side plugins/modifications enabled, so we would like to rule those out first.

Could you please perform the following tests?

Launch the game directly through Steam, without Pulsar, any other third-party software, and with all Steam launch options temporarily removed, so we can review a completely vanilla log.
Create a brand-new vanilla Star System without any mods or plugins.
Disable "Enable Steam Cloud" in the game settings (Options -> Game), restart the game, and test using only local blueprints, as you mentioned that opening the Blueprint menu can also trigger the issue.
If possible, temporarily disconnect or disable any secondary monitor(s) and test the game using only a single display.
As an additional troubleshooting step, please also try disabling "Autosave" for the test world.

If the issue still occurs after completing the steps above, please provide us with:

the complete "SpaceEngineers_date_time" log from that vanilla session in its original .txt format,
a screenshot of the Windows Task Manager (Processes tab) showing the memory usage while the issue is occurring,
let us know whether your Windows page file (virtual memory) is enabled and set to System managed,
and let us know whether you have experienced similar system-wide freezes or unusually high memory usage in any other games or applications, or if this behavior is exclusive to Space Engineers.

Thank you in advance.

Kind Regards,

Keen Software House: QA Department

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Evan Korling ●

Log from test world with all troubleshooting, in addition a screenshot of task manager from the test following a freeze. Due to freeze, I wasn't able to get a screenshot during the issue, but it was roughly the same.

I noticed this time the freeze didn't last as long, but there was a buzzing sound in my headphones for the duration of the test after the game launched.

My page file is set to system managed and enabled, and I haven't been able to recreate the issue with any other programs.

Files:

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William McGoose ●

So, this is going to sound weird Evan, but if you can test this by opening the Resource Monitor windows applet (search for "Resource Monitor" in your windows search), and leave it open on the Memory tab somewhere you can see (if possible) while playing SE, and see if the "Commit" column keeps climbing to insane numbers beyond the memory reported by task manager. 30+ GB listed in Commit, for instance.

If this is the same issue I've been poking at recently, the logs won't report anything weird, and even giving more page file size won't really impact this other than to make SE the only thing that starts locking up instead of the entire PC.

I've been chasing this issue for months after it became a big enough problem to cause the dot.net GC to start losing its mind and lock my system up in a matter of minutes after starting the save up. I was seeing Unmanaged memory allocations in jetbrains' Dot.Net memory profiler continuously grow to match the committed memory's growth, and eventually traced it down through the use of SysInternals' "ProcMon" utility to dozens of QueryOpen process calls every second to the "%Steampath%/SpaceEngineers/Content/Textures/BackgroundCube/Final/BackgroundCubeIndirect.dds" file while any save was open, even without mods. What I noticed was that with mods (especially planets with a higher memory footprint than vanilla ones), and lots of voxel edits and grids, the issue would become present far faster for me. It also didn't manifest for me if I had a modded skybox.

So I did a test and swapped to a modded skybox with a much larger *Indirect.dds file in it (I actually used Splitsie's Hubblegum and copied the "WrongWayUpNebula.dds" file and renamed it to "WrongWayUpNebulaIndirect.dds") and it solved the issue for me, NOT because it stopped referencing that file dozens of times a second with query opens, but because it's much larger, and I suspect the garbage collector was having an easier time purging fewer references when it was triggering because that file is 48 Mb instead of the vanilla one's 2 Mb.

I don't know what in the underlying code is causing this, I've been slowly poking at a memory leak issue with the game since the Core update last November, and I don't know if this issue is something new or something that was more recently made visible and the original issue I was looking into was one of the many fixes leaks in patches since, but my long-running save had recently become unplayable shortly before the Prosperity update and the fixes there hadn't resolved it, so I decided to dig deeper rather than lose the save, and found it affects every single SE save, regardless of settings or mods. I suspect the patch note reference in the Core release about this particular file reference may be involved.

So, this is going to sound weird Evan, but if you can test this by opening the Resource Monitor windows applet (search for "Resource Monitor" in your windows search), and leave it open on the Memory tab somewhere you can see (if possible) while playing SE, and see if the "Commit" column keeps climbing to insane numbers beyond the memory reported by task manager. 30+ GB listed in Commit, for instance.

If this is the same issue I've been poking at recently, the logs won't report anything weird, and even giving more page file size won't really impact this other than to make SE the only thing that starts locking up instead of the entire PC.

I've been chasing this issue for months after it became a big enough problem to cause the dot.net GC to start losing its mind and lock my system up in a matter of minutes after starting the save up. I was seeing Unmanaged memory allocations in jetbrains' Dot.Net memory profiler continuously grow to match the committed memory's growth, and eventually traced it down through the use of SysInternals' "ProcMon" utility to dozens of QueryOpen process calls every second to the "%Steampath%/SpaceEngineers/Content/Textures/BackgroundCube/Final/BackgroundCubeIndirect.dds" file while any save was open, even without mods. What I noticed was that with mods (especially planets with a higher memory footprint than vanilla ones), and lots of voxel edits and grids, the issue would become present far faster for me. It also didn't manifest for me if I had a modded skybox.

So I did a test and swapped to a modded skybox with a much larger *Indirect.dds file in it (I actually used Splitsie's Hubblegum and copied the "WrongWayUpNebula.dds" file and renamed it to "WrongWayUpNebulaIndirect.dds") and it solved the issue for me, NOT because it stopped referencing that file dozens of times a second with query opens, but because it's much larger, and I suspect the garbage collector was having an easier time purging fewer references when it was triggering because that file is 48 Mb instead of the vanilla one's 2 Mb.

I don't know what in the underlying code is causing this, I've been slowly poking at a memory leak issue with the game since the Core update last November, and I don't know if this issue is something new or something that was more recently made visible and the original issue I was looking into was one of the many fixes leaks in patches since, but my long-running save had recently become unplayable shortly before the Prosperity update and the fixes there hadn't resolved it, so I decided to dig deeper rather than lose the save, and found it affects every single SE save, regardless of settings or mods. I suspect the patch note reference in the Core release about this particular file reference may be involved.

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Memory util. issues causing PC and keyboard freezes.

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