Sign in to follow this  
wipeout

are we ever going to address the weird ass insane memory usage of the client?

Recommended Posts

So this has been a thing since like the first changes that where made to the client when budda came onboard(so its been around for a looooong time) but isnt it high time by now that someone sits down for a few months and starts addressing the weird ass memory usage(and cpu) from multiple clients regardless of configs that are used?

Task manager displays
u4TLEet.png

process hacker displays (total allocated vs currently in use of task manager)
jCS4CCm.png

In the scenario shown all 4 clients where booted up and where standing next to each other having only moved to not log out again all same config in a reasonably build up deed

I know for me memory isnt a issue really nor is half a core being taken up but the inconsistency is weird and mind you i have seen clients get up to 14gb of actual usage and 21 allocated before not to long ago 

This wont be a quick simple fix done quickly but now with all that extra funding coming in and so many more players and all the upcoming changes that are hinted at it might be time to sit down and have a good look at the client itself to make it run better again dont focus on new features for the client(who ever gets assigned to this) just work on making the client more uniform and stable as i do believe a lot can be done to make our old aging client behave better that goes beyond giving it a new coat of paint(ui update or more visuals)

And yes this isnt the first time nor will probably be the last time i make a topic about this asking you guys to please have a proper look and set out to try and optimize the dam client but it really does need to happen sooner then later mind you i am not the only one who tends to complain about this from time to time gl chat and streamers do from time to time to *stares at fabricant as an example*

  • Like 7

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

My very low settings clients are ranging from 900MB and 2.5GB RAM.  They just stand idle in the same spot.  It makes no sense.

 

+1 to fixing this issue.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

There is the Low Memory Client you can choose maybe that is them adressing the issue:)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
37 minutes ago, Cipacadrinho said:

There is the Low Memory Client you can choose maybe that is them adressing the issue:)

 

For some reason, when i use a low memory client, the memory usage is same but i keep freezing every few seconds when moving the camera

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I had assumed the low memory client wasn't a client that was designed to use less memory, but was a client that had a cap on the amount of memory that was allowed to be used, which would explain the freezing every few seconds.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
2 hours ago, Cipacadrinho said:

There is the Low Memory Client you can choose maybe that is them adressing the issue:)

No no that is not them addressing the issue at all low mem client has so many issues for regular play for so many people and acts just as wonky as normal

Top one is normal bottom one is low mem
iXmgnyY.png

tIQMjqQ.png
The only thing it does in the long run is maybe run a bit lower overall but the fact that 1 still using the old ui(i miss old ui colors on the bars) and 2 the amount of issues it has where sooner or later after a long period of play memory leaks happen that result in 10+gb of ram being actively used does not make it a viable option

This isnt solved by going "oh use the low mem client and it will be fine" this is a issue with the game itself that needs to be addressed beyond a simple "low mem" option it is optimizing and tweaking the client so that it overall is more clear on memory usage and more uniform(if you wanna call it that) amongst play sessions so that you dont have 8gb of usage on 4-8 clients after 10+ hours or some days after 10 minutes depending on what you are doing there is a lot left in the client that needs to be worked on to make it better

One way to put it is the following
Imagine a game that is being worked on and the devs are reaching the point of first release(for wurm this was years ago) and the last few weeks if they arent being pushed by a publisher to go silly fast crunch a  majority of devs would spend their time working on quality control and making sure the game they work on is stable not just game breaking bugs but memory and cpu and gpu sage they test models they test the code they try to see if the game is working as intended without weird things happening and if they are found they try to fix them

I propose that someone in the dev team works on that for a while that part of making the client's engine(think car engine) just run more smooth and balanced where it doesnt suddenly use up so much ram that even at 64gb of ram you get told "your running out of memory please close some programs" because you have wurm open for a whole day and you traveled around the server to go hunting

Edit: by the time i was done writing this this was the state of the 2 clients
FQliGL9.png
Still top being normal and bottom being low mem mind you both are on the same spot as with my op and low mem client is also using more cpu on average then normal >.>

Edited by wipeout

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Is this possible to be caching related issues on windows 10? I remember when i had access to windows 7 it used way less memory.Tried with sysmain service off?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
6 minutes ago, Tor said:

Is this possible to be caching related issues on windows 10? I remember when i had access to windows 7 it used way less memory.Tried with sysmain service off?

Back then(no clue how long ago you where last using 7 but for me it was a long while) the client had a lot less going for it as well so its understandable that it would be less resource intensive at the time but this isnt directed at the "total resource usage" at a specific time its directed at the irregular behavior found between the clients that are running at once where some will happily sit around 1.3gb to 1.9gb and others sit at 5-8gb if not more even though none of them have left the same area or where other times 1 will fully soak up a core worth of power and others clients wont 

The topic and these replies are more aimed at showing how the client isnt uniform with its overall performance that is showing that there is a lot of work that can be done to make the client function better overall and in turn most likely also increase performance vs the idea of "oh its using too much" its not a user setting that causes these things its the client being old and having years and more then a handful of devs working on it leading to inefficiencies and weirdness that lead to these weird effects happening that can in some cases(multiple clients or wurm+heavy usage elsewhere) lead to poor performance for the system overall
Great example is 4 clients running fine for hours on end all sitting under 2gb of ram and around 8% cpu usage(8 core no hyperthread 3.2ghz) each or less and suddenly out of the blue 1 or 2 will ramp up cpu usage followed by ram usage going sky high and remaining high until restart
Or in some other cases ram shoots down to only using around 800 or less mb when others sit around 1.3-2gb and that low ram using client is stuttering upon walking until a restart of said client

There are a lot of cases like this that happen when using a single client or multiple at once that just scream work needs to be done that isnt related to user issues that we cant just chalk up to "its java get over it"
Like i would not mind if the end result is more ram usage overall with no weird spikes in either and better performance for the end user thats fine but what isnt is these weird cases that happen quite often for people that just lead to instability elsewhere

When wurm gets so taxing with 4 clients that a vlc is having issues playing an audio file you know something weird is going on especially when that same pc can happily run 22 clients on some settings toned down for days on end(if no weirdness happens for any client) in the same area with render on its just that my use case is generally 4 clients for 12-14 hour stretches with some being left online for days on end(sac for food in the morning is a blessing) unless doing sermons

But again i just hope that a dev or devs will some time soon take the time to just start looking at the client and trying to optimize and clean up the client as i really do believe its high time for that

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Like 3 month ago on that slaying with over 200 people in local, had around 2-2.5g of ram usage on each of the clients. But yeah, agree there's been "heavy" performance hits when the standalone client was introduced and now with the new ui and other changes, or at least it "feels" like to me.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Try to beat this, and I am just standing at the entrance of a canal doing nothing (8,2% out of 64 GB of RAM). 😉 

 

jGM6b8e.png

Edited by Platyna

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The client is written in java & java is, was and always will be a memory hog. 

  • Like 3

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
4 minutes ago, zethreal said:

The client is written in java & java is, was and always will be a memory hog. 


That isn’t how that works, if anything Java garbage collection would be an improvement over a traditionally coded game. Wurm Online doesn’t release unused memory very well.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
3 minutes ago, zethreal said:

The client is written in java & java is, was and always will be a memory hog. 

Overall memory usage is not the problem its the inconsistency that is the client has a lot of moments where usage goes weird either increases exponentially or somehow gets to be less then the "normal" amount of usage and creates stutters when moving or doing anything other then standing still
This is not an attempt to "oh you guys need to optimize to use less ram and cpu power" but a "you guys need to optimize to fix the weird behavior the client tends to show at times" especially now with wurms giant growth stuff like this will come to light a lot more as more people will experience this and be affected by it

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
21 minutes ago, zethreal said:

The client is written in java & java is, was and always will be a memory hog. 

but you can literally set the amounts of memory it's allowed to use 🤔

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
11 minutes ago, Finnn said:

but you can literally set the amounts of memory it's allowed to use 🤔

 

You can, and you get 4 FPS. 😉 

Edited by Platyna

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
16 hours ago, Platyna said:

 

You can, and you get 4 FPS. 😉 

no it's only memory limitation not computational power limitation.......

+ there's that garbage collector.. I used to run wurm with a batch file executing java +gc etc params for that and pointing full url to jnlp client, which worked perfectly fine for me for years when that was a thing, and other complained about performance issues, most of the time I had none(at times there were patches affecting everyone with crashes etc, cant evade these..) 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

These clients all loaded at the same time and all in one big cave together, doing nothing.  Why the massive differences in memory use?  After a day, my 64GB of RAM will max out.  Clients just sitting there.  Going nowhere.  Getting bloated.

 

Would someone from the dev team give us a little clarity about why this works this way?  Is there some trick we can use to prevent this behavior?

 

http://prntscr.com/u6zo0u

 

 

Edited by Wurmhole
  • Like 2

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Java is notorious for memory leaks, even in professional products.

 

The only time I've seen java memory management done well for an mmorpg client would be "Seyken" (now defunct); whoever coded that client optimised it to the point I could run it on an Intel atom net-potato at 30 FPS.

 

Wurm is just terribly optimised; which is understandable given that it is legacy code built on top of legacy code which was derived by following a bad tutorial to extend something out of R'lyeh whose documentation exists only in legend.

Edited by Etherdrifter

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
On 8/26/2020 at 4:12 AM, Tor said:

 

For some reason, when i use a low memory client, the memory usage is same but i keep freezing every few seconds when moving the camera

 

I get these random frame drops as well with normal client.. every so often just drops to 0-7fps for like a millisecond.

 

I wouldn't mind it using more memory if it ran smoother.

 

Also wouldn't the current ram use depend on the assets in the area of the person? Maybe it's using RAM instead of VRAM for textures?

I have no idea. Not a progammer.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Here is an interesting note about my memory bloating on clients over time - clients that sit idle all day.  If I minimize the client window, it gets buggy and is likely to bloat like crazy over time.  If I don't minimize and leave it up all the time, it does not bloat.  This is early in my discovery, so things could change, but so far it is night and day different for my PC that has a ton of alts.  The PC normally gobbles up all 64GB in a day.  I've over a day now and just 32GB used so far.  Very pleased.

 

So Devs, please check and see what is causing minimized clients to bloat?

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

We're making the assumption the devs haven't already looked into this and fixing it breaks 20 other things so they decided the fix was worse then the initial problem.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
7 hours ago, Object said:

We're making the assumption the devs haven't already looked into this and fixing it breaks 20 other things so they decided the fix was worse then the initial problem.

Considering that once upon a time this was not a thing and then during a series of updates over a year ago this issue started and has progressively gotten worse and worse as time went on and more updates are applied id say that we cant just go "oh they might have tried to fix it and it breaks other things so they didnt do it" that is laziness at its core and why problems like this last for as long as they do in the land of wurm

There is another fun thing where the game can stutter and run like ###### but barely use any cpu or gpu power what so ever and there are a few more issues like this that pop up either during startup on rare times or after running long long sessions either left in the background or minimized or world render turned off and then on again there are just too many of them to really say "they tried to fix it but it breaks more stuff and it gets worse" as what this is isnt that this is bugs making the client perform poorly in situations that are quite common for a lot of people under wildly different system configurations

And before anyone once again brings up "oh but its java it will always be ######" let me tell you about a little game called distant worlds universe a game that graphically looks like spreadsheet online with early 2000's graphics for an 4x yes but runs purely on java and handles so so so much more yet even in giant battles with weapon effects that are amazing it will happily run at high sim speed and a stable 120 fps or higher but once upon a time it did not the devs at code force kept working and working on content to a point where the game ran but there where many cases where it would run poorly after periods of time so they took their time to work on optimizing it they took their time to go over older code and see if they could standardize and streamline it(something we all know wurm could use both client and server) and the effect of that endeavor was a game that went from having a max cap of 18 ai before lag in late game to 64 ai before lag in late late game with map sizes being twice as big and the game still running smooth

Every game that runs for a long time(looking at you stellaris) needs to and goes through a moment where the devs just need to stop with new content and focus on fixing what is there
I mentioned stellaris as they did just that recently they redid 3 of the biggest lag inducing slowdowns to sim speed to the mid and late game(that where not an issue on stellaris 1.0 but where an issue on 2.5 because of so much more content) and the community loved it sure it meant a dlc was pushed back sure it meant a major update with not so many new additions as otherwise would have been but it was worth the investment

Rimworld is another great example as the game neared 1.0 release and the game grew in userbase mods started to show up that made improvements to the core game better pathfinding that was less resource intensive the cleaning up of save data of old junk(entire family tree is dead? well lets keep that data shall we) mods that would trim memory usage and the list goes on and on
A lot of these mods have finally made it into the game and why? because 40k+ people subscribed to those mods and kept talking about it everywhere to get the dev to have a serious look at performance of long running games be it vanilla or modded as once again here was a dev/dev team who's testing was limited to early and mid game only and never taking into account late game
And wurm kinda has that same issue short sessions 1-2 clients works as you would expect but a 8-12 hour session with 4+ clients? ya no the system you are running it on will experience issues just doing anything and so do the clients and again that shows there is work that needs to be done for those who play for long periods of a time and use multiple clients, just like in rimworld and stellaris and distant worlds the devs where constantly reminded until they decided "hey lets have a clear look" and all 3 times it turned out that yes there where issues that needed addressing for those longer play sessions/late game progression(stellaris being a 32 bit for the longest time because it being an engine limitation meant out of ram issues where so common before)



Anyway i really do hope that some time the devs will start to have a proper look at just cleaning up and optimizing the code and if a optimization leads to worse problems elsewhere then dont just go "oh well cant fix it" like your reply assumes they did but instead sit down and have a look as to why this is happening and why that gets worse
And until that time comes i will keep talking about it just like others do as it affects my play style it affects others too and issues like this need addressing and often are the hardest to fix but they are worthwhile to do so
 

Edited by wipeout

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Yeah the requiremenets to play Wurm have insanely ramped up in the past 3 years. I get that new content was added and new graphics.

 

But the issue is that if you set the graphics on the minimum possible settings, wurm is still hogging up an insane amount of memory even on 1 client. Opening 2 clients leaves me with odd fluctuations as well. I've upgraded my PC but I can still hear the cooling fans sounding like jets taking off when I login my main+ priest.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I recently changed my PC to strong setup, but before that, got weaker setup, wich was strong enough to run Skyrim on above average settings.

 

On this older setup, in Wurm, when I was alone in local all was good, but if suddenly I entered other players local, and had like 3 of them, game suddenly got spikes and lags. It seems, like game needed some time to just process their presence (and I guess their actions).

 

Also game happened to get more lags and spikes when I had a youtube in the background with music, wich should be laughable burden for CPU on this setup (I had Nvidia GeForce GTX960 and Intel Xeon X3440 4x2.53 GHz at that time).

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Having players in local for some reason seems to be the main culprit of insane memory usage. 


Can't even count the number of times when in pvp 20-30 people drove my ram to the limit. Some people even experienced crashed.

 

Unique hunts where people bring their bajilion alts also cause wurm to run in 1-2 fps. 16 gigs of ram and a decent amd graphics card and i still get lag when too many people are around.

 

The second culprit seems to be related to number of items in local. Specifically from my experience : walls. Everything that is related to walls, hedges, bushes seems to drive lag up a bit quite a lot. I have a small deed on epic, but due to its high amount of walls it seems to cause lag for a lot of people. Deli is the same so it's not server based.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this