EverqQuest2.exe 1.8gigs of memory usage?!?!?

[Eyefon]

BDoodle wrote:

Kiyran@Antonia Bayle wrote:

10:22 1.643gb- Very laggy then ... CRASH!!

****CRASH!****EverQuest II has detected an unrecoverable error and must shutdown.E:liveeq2frameworkcoredevicessrcDirectX9RenderDevi ce.cpp(2704):DirectX Error. (E_OUTOFMEMORY)009c72b5 009ca778

Kiyran, I'm glad you've noticed a link between the possible memory leak issue and the DirectX issue that some people are experiencing. I have been tracking these two issues also, as I too have been suffering from the results.

A trick that can be kinda annoying, but can save a raid wipe, is to run in windowed mode and minimize the window when you notice memory usage getting close to crash levels (user specific), and restore it after a few seconds. As Rothgar has kindly pointed out, this causes Windows to trim the working memory set for the minimized window, (freeing up working memory for other applications,) and at the same time you drop a bunch of rendering info and resources. (If I misquoted you Rothgar please feel free to beat me about the head, preferably with something soft.) It was also pointed out that this method has limitations. But used wisely, could save wipes and other potentially embarassing situations.

I do not know if this possible link has been identified by the developers looking at each issue, but I think it is worth looking into.

One of the common features that I have noticed in the above error, (compiling info from the DirectX thread,) is the address info at the bottom of the error message. Where the DirectX9RenderDevice.cpp (a virtual device) is concerned, the address location begins with '009cxxxx' or there abouts. (Vista users are reporting similar errors - GammaRamp and DX E_Fail - at address locations >= 0098xxxx - 0099xxxx).

It was a toss up of which thread to disscuss this in, as they appear as two separate issues, but I have a feeling that solving the memory issue will have a direct effect on the DirectX issue. (Just a hunch, that's all.)

My observations may suggest that either, the creation of the virtual device (for those crashing at program startup,) or the attempt to access the device at the above locations in memory are meet with unexpected data at these locations, and hence return a null or an error to the calling function/application. Yes, it is possible that the DirectX data is being corrupted is some way, either via the DDI or from within the API. But I believe we would see a much broader group of users being affected if this were the case.

This leads to the questions of what is in the pointed to address space and why it is there. Is the memory being assigned to another project? Is the render device itself the leaky component? Or is the memory pointer pointing to the wrong location? I dont know.

These and many other interesting concepts are what's making eq2 fun for me at the moment. I hope it helps anyway.

Hiya BDoodle -

I have tried the minimizing trick, and I usually run in windowed mode, but it only helps briefly. It's to the point where I don't group anymore because I hate to crash when people are depending on me. =/ If I minimize when I notice the lag, it'll help for a few minutes, but it's an inevitable and imminent crash.

I suppose the question is now this, if we're seeing a DirectX issue here that is caused by corrupt memory for vista users, why are more people not noticing this? Or are they, but they have enough memory to not "care"? In addition, how high would the memory issue go, in theory, if you had a full 6gb? 8gb? Would it eventually exhaust that as well?

I'm looking at upgrading to windows7 this weekend, which will unlock my full 6gb of memory that is currently unavailable under vista 32bit. Hopefully that will help... or at least make it so I can play in groups again.

[Maergoth]

This is getting to the point of absurdity. I crash EVERY time I zone now, and I get multiple error windows popping up, 3-4 crash reports per crash, and sometimes I'll get the crash error and still be able to play until I hit "Okay" on the crash window. I get no lag. I run the game on higher than max settings (Forced 8xAA and 16xAF) and I don't run into any trouble except for these crashes.

Sometimes I'll be standing still and crash, some times it will be zoning, some times it will be when I take a screenshot or open Legends of Norrath. Some times I can recreate the crash endlessly and every time I zone into some guild halls. I have to have someone move me out of the zone or turn my settings to absolute minimum (which still doesn't always work) to get out.

Prior to these latest attempts at a fix, I only crashed zoning between the guild hall, Loping Plains and Zarrakon. 

I just upgraded from Windows XP (DX9.0c) to Windows 7 (DX11), and reinstalled all drivers didn't fix the problem.

I did a fresh install of the game on a different hard drive, still didn't fix the problem.

I bought 2 new 2 gig sticks of 800 speed DDR2 RAM, still didn't fix the problem.

Minimizing does not prevent anything, nor does running in low memory mode or any of the other tricks posted.

I have been hearing complaints from absolutely everyone about crashing lately while zoning. People with every kind of configuration imaginable, EXCEPT the people with absolutely terrible computers who run on the lowest settings all the time.

There have been issues in the past where workarounds have been forcefully kept under wraps to keep a high priority on fixing the actual cause of these problems, or to keep some random person from "fixing" a problem the developers can't. If this is the case, please reconsider.. because this is unplayable.

[Lortet]

I posted too early yesterday - crashes became more and more frequent, despite a complete reboot, until I gave up in disgust.

Re minimising - our family runs eq2 on three pcs, one xp (mine) one vista and one W7 - minimising makes absolutely no difference on the vista or W7 machines, but a large difference on the xp machine. AT the same time, the xp machine needs it more.

I have not downgraded my graphics - the balance of crashes vs bleeding eyes is still on the side of crashing atm, but that is based on some sort of faith that there will be a fix.

[MyleeSilverwings]

Switched characters to my main who had logged out yesterday in the T3 guild hall.  While loading into guild hall, crashed with out of memory error.  Logged back in, did some banking, took the bell to Lavastorm, crashed with out of memory error.  I wasn't in the guild hall more than 5 minutes.

Otherwise, today has been stable for 5 hours, but wasn't anywhere near the guild hall.  I had high hopes, but I guess the large guild halls are wreaking havoc with memory usage

[Ebarel]

not knowing if it is helpful but lately i can see more lds on others and myself directly related to effects ingame. so it seems that you are very likely crashing when you get purple vision from Ykesha, the ice-form-stun in miraguls etc. especially for miragul we have quite frequrent ppl going linkdead the second they get the effect. not only annoying but killing a raid due to bad ld timing.

[Kaiser Sigma]

Granted I haven't read the 21 pages, just the first 10 or so but despite the mention of hotfixes, my Eq2 client keeps on using 1.8b memory and dropping my performance into oblivion. Even in atari mode (extreme performance) I keep getting hiccups in which the game becomes unbearably laggy and the framerate drops to 4 - 6~.

Like everybody else, never experienced this pre GU #53~.

[Enever]

This also screws up my voice chat when it crashes. I experianced this crash 3 times last night throughout the day after zoning several times.

[Rothgar]

Hey guys, I just wanted to post another update on the memory issue.

We found and fixed another problem with allocating "shader palettes" when zoning.  It's possible that this could be a big reason why some of you are crashing.  It could have a lot to do with system settings, performance settings, etc.

We are going to test this fix in QA early this week and will get a hotfix out ASAP.  If we cannot get it to pass QA in time for Tuesday's hotfix I will do everything I can to schedule an additional hotfix if this change helps the problem.

Thanks for hanging in there.

[Kitsune]

Thanks for the update, and for trying so hard to fix this.  It is apprecaited.

[EQAditu]

I have something to add that's somewhat interesting to me.  Unrelatedly I upgraded my system(essentially all of it) and experience similar things.  The only commonality between the two systems are an AMD processor and the game settings(and the same case?).  I guess I'll get into the system changes as they're partially relevant to the rest: AMD Athlon X2(AM2+) to AMD Phenom X4(AM3); nVidia 8800(512MB) to ATI 5850(1GB); 4GB(3.25 addressable) DDR2 to 8GB DDR3; WindowsXP SP3 32 to Windows7 64.

As I said, fairely different systems in all regards except the game settings.  Going about a day of raiding, memory usage was fairly similar.  Being in my guild hall would bring me up to 1-1.2GB easily and by the time I got back to the guild hall from ending the raid, it'd be up to at least 1.6GB.  1.8GB used to be a common place to crash with the out-of-memory OK dialog box.  I didn't use the /3GB switch so the user mode memory was only about that much anyhow.

With more memory was more head room...  I'd get that quick initial climb on loading and the first zone, but it'd be considerably slower after that.  I think I finished a night at 2.4GB usage.  I knew it wasn't fixed but it was nice to go so long without crashing.  So I pressed my luck last night and increased my texture resolution(since I had double the memory).  I went from High/Max/High to Max/Max/Max.  As I expected, the memory usage exceeded the previous point and the client crashed at 2.8GB.  It was an immediate Win7 close program box however, not the OK error dialog saying allocating memory failed.  I forgot to read it as I wanted to successfully load into my character in time for it to LD but not drop from the game.

Anyways, it somewhat suggested to me that it was my game settings and not a hardware configuration.  The problem is that I don't use the SoE provided profiles and I never have for the past five years.  I don't even know what they entail when people mention them.  I fine tune my settings to what is playable for me balanced against exactly what I'm missing out on.  I've however always tried to keep my texture resolution as high as I could and still avoid stuttering.

PS, these numbers are process Private Bytes, not Working Set(though they're usually the same) nor Virtual Size.  I don't use any funny tricks like minimizing to drop the memory pages out of RAM.

[Babayaaga]

My Del Precision M4300 has been having issues for about 3 weeks, when the new graphics "buff" was applied in a patch. It's currently sitting at 247,164K of memory usage (HOLY COW!). I used to be able to run 2 clients on this same computer without any performance issues using the Extreme Performance setting, now I can't even run one client.

The system is a 2.0 Core 2 duo processor with 3.5 gigs of ram (it's running XP, may go up to Win 7 to use all 5gigs). The video card is a Quadro FX 360M with 256 actual up to 512 accessible memory.

What happens is the game loads up smoothly, and stays perfectly smooth performance wise for about 5 minutes. Then, sporatically for about 5 minutes I will get one frame every 45 seconds. It clears up... runs smoothly for another 5-10 minutes, then it goes back to the 1 frame every 45 seconds again before it clears. Everquest2.exe sits between 2.150 to 2.6 Gigs of memory usage in the Task Manager.

Here's what I've done:

• Defragged my system about 50 times
• Installed more Ram (had 2.0 gigs initially, now I have 5... only 3.5 which is accessible by XP)
• Backed up and removed all personal files to an external drive leaving only the core system and application files
• Removed EQ2 entirely (including the Sony Folder)
• Ran complete Antivirus and AntiMalware applications to ensure nothing was awry
• Cleaned out the Run folder within HKEY...LocalMachine and CurrentUser of any extraneous stuff that doesnt need to load on startup
• Ran MSConfig and unchecked unnecessary programs from startup
• Reinstalled the game
• Performed an entire system diagnostic to ensure no hardware was failing
• I've set the paging file to be 1.5 times the amount of ram

No change... still getting the same 1 frame every 45 seconds. But here's the real kicker. I have a Macbook Pro with almost identical hardware configuration and I can run 2 windowed instances of the game without any of these problems.

The Macbook Pro has a 2.4 Core 2 Duo processor, 4 Gigs of Ram and an Nvidia Geforce 8600M GT graphics card with 256 MB of dedicated Ram. Here's the weirdest thing... right now it is reporting that it is using 819,540 memory in the task manager... yet the game is running smoothly. Huh?

The systems are similar... the Macbook is a hair better but the performance difference is massive. 

What gives guys? Not sure what else I can do outside get another computer, but that's just unrealistic just to play a game.

[Einadin]

Rothgar wrote:

Hey guys, I just wanted to post another update on the memory issue.

We found and fixed another problem with allocating "shader palettes" when zoning.  It's possible that this could be a big reason why some of you are crashing.  It could have a lot to do with system settings, performance settings, etc.

We are going to test this fix in QA early this week and will get a hotfix out ASAP.  If we cannot get it to pass QA in time for Tuesday's hotfix I will do everything I can to schedule an additional hotfix if this change helps the problem.

Thanks for hanging in there.

Any word of whether or not this will indeed go live Tuesday?

[Rothgar]

We're finishing up QA on this now.  Our first QA pass this morning revealed a crash with the particle generator system that we've fixed and are re-testing.

If this passes we'll be fine for tomorrow.

[Eveningsong]

Woot, really appreciate the update Rothgar

[Einadin]

Rothgar wrote:

We're finishing up QA on this now.  Our first QA pass this morning revealed a crash with the particle generator system that we've fixed and are re-testing.

If this passes we'll be fine for tomorrow.

Thank you!  If this does get through tomorrow, can you please post here since throughout the history of this particular issue the changes haven't been posted in the update notes?

[kelesia]

I really hope this update fixes some of the issues I've had attempting to play two clients. before this mess started i could play two easily. now i drop to 0% free memory running two, and crash. please please please fix.

[Eyefon]

Rothgar wrote:

We're finishing up QA on this now.  Our first QA pass this morning revealed a crash with the particle generator system that we've fixed and are re-testing.

If this passes we'll be fine for tomorrow.

Awesome! Thanks for all your hard work Rothgar. I'm sure we'll all post soon with our results. Hopefully good results! =)

[Jeraxel]

Hey all...I was having the same problem for a short time with the game as well, but I seem to have gotten it sorted out. It might have been a bit simpler for me to figure out because I took a break from EQ to play a flight sim for a while, which required only one major modification to my system. When I started playing again, and had this problem, I simply reversed the modification, and no more issues, no more lag, no more “out of memory” crashes, etc... What happened was that the other game required I update my Nvidia graphics driver from the original one that belonged to this machine (an Alienware Area-51 M9750 with and Nvidea GeForce 8700M GT) to one of Nvidea's newer beta versions. I simply fixed that issue, reloaded the old driver, updated my DirectX just for good measure, and the problem resolved. Hope that helps you all...

[Poss]

I assume the hotfix has been done by now? My client doesn't seem to have received the update(EU servers) since it still says (Oct 27 2009) in the title bar... Hoping for fixed client to go live sooooon!

Jeraxel: I have a Radeon card and havent done any funky beta driver stuff and I have memory issues since GU53 so I dont think it has anything to do with that...

[Maergoth]

To those wondering.. this hotfix did not fix the crashing. Don't get your hopes up, the crash hotfix will probably go in soon, but this is not that patch.

[Numakoros]

Rothgar wrote:

Hey guys, I just wanted to post another update on the memory issue.

We found and fixed another problem with allocating "shader palettes" when zoning.  It's possible that this could be a big reason why some of you are crashing.  It could have a lot to do with system settings, performance settings, etc.

We are going to test this fix in QA early this week and will get a hotfix out ASAP.  If we cannot get it to pass QA in time for Tuesday's hotfix I will do everything I can to schedule an additional hotfix if this change helps the problem.

Thanks for hanging in there.

 I tried this out last night.  Since GU53 every time I have zoned from Kylong Plains to Jasarath wastes on my Home PC I would crash. (numerous bug reports filed)  I reduced the graphics to extreme performance and no issue at all.  Normally I play in High Graphics mode with Flora turned off. 

Cheers

[Rothgar]

The hotfix did go out this morning.  You should see the client using less memory now, but if it hasn't fixed your crash, I apologize.  We are still looking into it.

[Enever]

So far so good, however I can not still open the LON client in-game without a crash.

[Bremer]

Have the same problem, /lon -> crash

[Eyefon]

Same with me, LON crashes unless it's the very first thing I do when I log in, and then it still has a good chance of crashing.

[Arianah]

Opening LoN after being online for a few hours would crash me before the GU53 memory issue...

[MyleeSilverwings]

Wow, I am feeling so optimistic!!  I played multiple characters for 6 hours this evening ... lots of switching between chars. tons of zoning, even into and out of the T3 guild hall ... and I was completely stable! 

Not only that, I am seeing how fast Windows 7 is for the first time since installing it 10 days ago!  My fps ran between 45 - 60 all night long, only dipping to 25 while in the guild hall.

Thank you, Rothgar - I think you might have found the answer to the problems, at least for me!  Should this change, I will surely be back to let you know   Hope this works for everybody else as well!

/does the happy dance!

[Kadie]

Thank you for all of the help and effort by the development team, however this issue is far from resolved.  I don't have a power computer, but my system can easily handle EQ2... Athlon 64 4000+,  4GB RAM (3.5GB recognized), 512MB 9800 GTX+, Win XP SP3 ( freshly reformatted and re-installed everything)... or at least USED to be able to handle EQ2 before the GU53. Tonight, I had to play in windowed mode and continually minimize EQ2 to refresh my system memory... the EQ2 .exe was reaching 1,500,000k in memory usage within 15-20 mins. Logging in another character would instantly add 350,000-500,000k to the .exe's memory usage.

I greatly appreciate all the effort being put into fixing this current memory leak... I just wanted to offer some feedback and inform the developers that the issue isn't resolved. Thank you for your time and consideration.

[Gaige]

1.4GB is normal useage I'm pretty sure?

[Einadin]

Tikatika@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Wow, I am feeling so optimistic!!  I played multiple characters for 6 hours this evening ... lots of switching between chars. tons of zoning, even into and out of the T3 guild hall ... and I was completely stable! 

Not only that, I am seeing how fast Windows 7 is for the first time since installing it 10 days ago!  My fps ran between 45 - 60 all night long, only dipping to 25 while in the guild hall.

Thank you, Rothgar - I think you might have found the answer to the problems, at least for me!  Should this change, I will surely be back to let you know   Hope this works for everybody else as well!

/does the happy dance!

I agree.  I haven't had any issues since yesterday's patch.  I will continue playing normally and post here if any crashes happen.  Another thing I have noticed since this patch is that the program does not go into the low-memory mode often (if at all).  Pre-GU 53, although I wasn't crashing, I was popping into low-memory mode quickly.