Memory Issue

Soul Crusher · 05-14-09, 09:42 PM

So when I was playing earlier today, we were questing in Terokkar Forest and suddenly the game had a critical error and shut down, can't remember exactly what the error said but the gist was I ran out of memory and it couldn't complete a task. A window to send an error report to Bliz opened when it crashed.

When I restarted the game and got logged back in I started watching My FuBar_PerformanceFu and nUI was sucking up more and more memory untill My Ram was exhausted.

Any thoughts or what more Information can I collect to help analyze the problem?

Thanks
and keep up the Great work
SC

spiel2001 · 05-15-09, 04:08 AM

It is normal for nUI to tick off about 2-300k every couple of seconds since it is performing an enormous amount of work at anywhere between 30 and 90 times a second. However, most of the memory it is ticking off was temporary dynamic memory (aka garbage) and it should be getting released by the garbage collector periodically.

As a rule, nUI tends to use around 11meg when solo and that will tend to tick up until you hit around 13 to 15meg and then reset. If you are in a 40 man raid, that number tends to be more like 35meg and ticking up to about 50meg or so before it resets.

nUI has *no* control over the garbage collector and when it runs. If your system is ticking up memory until it runs out and then throwing an error, then something in your WoW installation is *very* broken. WoW's garbage collector is known to have issues since the 3.0 patch, but the problem you're describing is the most sever I've ever heard and, frankly,

I don't know what to tell you... have you tried the clean install for nUI? If not, follow the directions here http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=21716 and see what happens. I have to admit though that I'm not hopeful its going to fix it in your case. I have a suspicion that your WoW install itself is corrupt. You could try running the repair utility though I have personally had little luck with that fixing problems like this. Alternatively, as painful as it may be, you may need to reinstall WoW from scratch.

If it matters any, I am busy incrementally re-writing the core of nUI's event engine to eliminate as much garbage production as I possibly can in order to reduce the impact of the garbage collector problem introduced in patch 3.0, but I do think your problem runs deeper than just that.

Soul Crusher · 05-15-09, 06:49 AM

Thanks for the speedy reply .... I'll try correcting the problem this evening when I get home from work and let you know what happens.

Thx again for the speedy reply
SC

Soul Crusher · 05-15-09, 10:30 PM

Well I tried the repair and clean install of nUI only. Then went and played for a while... once again questing in Terokkar (just two of us in the group). Since it was a clean install I didn't have My FuBar_PerformanceFu to watch but now and then I moused over the menu icon. Looked like the garbage dump was happening. The highest memory usage I saw nUI at was 28.2 megs which from what you said still seems somewhat high, but at least it was reseting and not crashing. Going to try adding My other mods tomorrow and see what happens.

Thx
SC

spiel2001 · 05-16-09, 08:05 AM

I'm glad to hear that is seems to have resolved itself at least somewhat. Also, in a two player party, I would expect the memory usage to be higher than the numbers I quoted you... even though it's only two players, it forces activate of the party unit panel which has all of the monitoring in it for a full five player party.

Hopefully after this weekend's work on the code that number will get smaller.

Aezay · 05-17-09, 12:41 PM

You do write you are rewriting the core part to reduce this garbage creation, which is good. But just out of curiosity, why does it create that much garbage? Does it create a lot of tables in an OnUpdate or OnEvent handler?
In the cases where I absolutely have to do this, I make it use a table recycler.

spiel2001 · 05-17-09, 12:47 PM

There are a great many places where it does use tables inside the event and update handlers... for example... when spells are cast on a unit the mod has to build a list of all spells on the unit, then sort the list by time remaining, etc. There are a myriad of places where this happens.

What I am in the process of doing is going through the entire set of update and event engine methods and removing all use of dynamic memory in lieu of building cache tables and recycling.

It's just a slow and tedious process where truly complex table manipulation is going on.