Enhanced client hogging memory?

[Roland of Atlantic]

I seem to remember a while back a big stink about this, but I can't seem to find the original thread to see if there was ever a decent fix for it.

Usually I play on my laptor, but the damned thing overheats with all the peripherals attached to it. So I hooked up my desktop, which is:

Computer:
AMD Phenom 9100 quad core 1.8 GHz
4 GB ram
Vista 64 bit
Ping is usually about 65

UOSA is tying up huge amounts of memory and getting progressively slower. I log in fresh, task manager shows UOSA using about 450,000 K. After 1 lap of Luna, it's about 900,000 K and the game barely moves. It doesn't matter if I recall to the middle of nowhere, the memory usage doesn't go down, it just keeps going up. If I start the game in the middle of the forest it runs fine, but as I walk around, it gradually builds up the memory usage until I can barely move, and every house makes the game freeze for several seconds. If I start fresh and don't move, it levels off about 490,000 K but every time a player or animal passes, you can watch it add up.

I updated DirectX to the current version. I loaded a fresh profile. I ran UO in admin mode. I have the game directoy set for full control for all profiles. Aside from that, I can't think of anything else to try. Any ideas?

 

[lucitus]

This is a long known problem, i found out the following.

In general the Enhanced Client seems memory leak free these days but if you first login, the performance goes down down down, you can relogin to get it fixed and then it stays a while on that performance level.

Also the cache setting has todo with it if you set it to 1024MB for example memory values over 1 GB are assumed, by setting it lower the memory assumption lowers but also the time the first performance iusse appears.

I found out log out and in fixes the most performance problems, but yes what we need is a bit of dev attentation i have no clue why the client behaves like it does.

Maybe from the other thread you can also try to disable footsteps and see if the performance iusses are also caused by that, only speculation.

I can run the client today more than the half day at once but i have to logout and login a few times.

 

[Roland of Atlantic]

I'll lower the cache and see how that affects it. I already messed with the footsteps, but that did nothing at all. Funny thing is, I can run the EC pretty much indefinitely on my laptop. It will suck up the identical amount of memory, but it doesn't get crippled by it, for some reason. With the desktop, as soon at it surpasses 700k, its virtually unplayable. The laptop will be fine when the memory maxes out at about a gigabyte. The specs of the two machines are similar, except for the laptop is a 2.1 GHz AMD Turion X2, and the desktop is a dual core AMD Phenom 1.8 GHz, and the laptop is running Win7 32 bit instead of Vista 64 bit. Same 4 gigs of memory.

Think putting more memory in it would stop it from falling on it's face?

 

[Merion]

4 Gig RAM should be enough, I run a pretty similar system to yours, only with Win 7 32bit (oh god how I hated Vista, 7 is great tho).

I think you maybe should factor in the graphics card. What model do you have? I got a Radeon HD 5850 Sapphire X Vapor an have no problems whatsoever. Memory usually goes up to 1.25 gig after some time and the speed of the fans going a little shows that the machine got work to do, but handles it without performace drops.

 

[Petra Fyde]

The reason I turned footsteps off was I discovered the missmatch between sound and movement was what was causing the 'seasick' effect I was getting. It wasn't for performance reasons.

 

[Roland of Atlantic]

I'd like someone to post numbers on the memory load of the classic client to see what the contrast is. What is so interesting is that there are games out there that are worlds more advanced graphically speaking than enhanced client, and many of them will run better on a moderately equipped machine.

I'd like to switch out the graphics card in my desktop so I could see what happens, but due to Murphy's law, Vista would prevent it from improving the performance, and I would be stuck buying another outrageously expensive version of windows. These days, it almost seems like the best way to upgrade is to just buy another machine. At least it would come with the newest Windows.

So I'll stick with the laptop and put a giant desk fan on it. *grumble*