Skyrim reaches 4Gb memory usage and freezes(possible memory leak)

[carlos3lance]

So, like the title says. My Step 2.2 modded Skyrim started freezing today with no reasonable explanation. It's not a crash to the desktop, just stops responding. I Alt+tabbed out a couple of times to look at the task manager, and it always happens when memory usage in the Performance tab reaches 4.2-4.3GB. While in idle, my rig sits at 1.2Gb with an other 7Gb physical memory available. On the hole I have 8Gb of physical Ram.

 

As I got further in and saved more, it seems to reach the peak faster, freezes becoming more frequent(and repeating like it does, being quite irritating).

 

 

The strange thing is, I've been playing for over a week - with good performance, no stuttering of any kind - (Skyrim unplugged active since modding it up) and it only started happening today(254 saves and a lot of hours in).  It would make sense that if I overly strained my rig with the details in mods, it would have behaved like this within the first 40 hours.

 

I thought of save bloating, but my saves are roughly 5.46Mb in size. Used to be 3.4 in the beginning around Helgen - so that can't be the case. Disabled auto saving completely, but that didn't stop the freezes.

 

The game is now freezing roughly every 15-20 mins. It's hard to name a constant, it's actually quite random. The freezes seem to be happening mostly in outside areas, though I did have 1 or 2 freezes in a dungeon as well.

 

The versions of the Step listed mods I installed are in 90% ratio in line with Baseline STEP (" ALL Core and non-Core mods; performance/quality and balanced options wherever possible; my box is nice but I hate FPS drops and stuttering!") given my system specs:

 

Windows 7 64bit

Intel Core i5 2400 3.10GHz

8Gb Ram: KingMax 4GB DDR3 1333MHz x2

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti UltraDurable 1GB DDR5 256-bit

 

If there's any specific information needed, I'll gladly oblige. At this point I really can't think of anything that should be causing this.

 

*Edit* Definitely a memory leak..can't be anything else. It's down to roughly 5-6 minutes of play time. Lookin at the task manager, memory usage is somewhere along 4.60 Gb. It's not even remotely noticeable in game. Haven't measured fps, but, turning 360 in the game is as smooth as butter, with no stuttering. Trouble is, at 4.60Gb of memory usage, it's a game of dice of when it actually freezes again...

[frihyland]

Tab out and back in to the game, that forces a hard memory reset. You may have to do it every 10 minutes to prevent the freezing... If you have any non STEP mods time to dump them and see if it helps any, if not dump all the non core STEP mods as well (especially graphics) and make sure you only have the lightest versions of every mod installed.

[carlos3lance]

I thought of that..and I guess I'll have to do that as a last resort. It would be a shame to miss out on the atmosphere added by those mods. Like I said, everything is Step only, mostly baseline 1024 resolution, with the exception of vast stretched out textures like the night sky and mountains.

 

For the time being, I may have found a fix that brings down my memory usage - not sure how it's related - I set CPU affinity for Skyrim from All 4 processors to Cpu 0 and Cpu 2. This seems to have brought my memory usage back down from 4.20Gb to 3.60 as I alt tabbed out, during heavy rain in whiterun.

[stoppingby4now]

I highly doubt it's RAM related since the total usage you are reporting isn't hitting your max installed. With 1GB VRAM, that is more likely the primary contributor of the freezes.

 

When looking at the Memory usage in the Performance tab, that figure is the total of all processes actively using memory. You will need to click on the "Resource Monitor" button in the Performance tab and look for TESV.exe. The "Working Set" column will tell you how much total physical RAM it is using.

[Agnusthemagi]

Your system setup is practially the same as mine, your solution most likely is following some or all of Skyrim Project Stability (search for it on nexus) and using cleanmem to fix the RAM issue like I do. I have just made a post where I explain what happened on my system and how cleanmem helps make my game playable. Link to post here: https://forum.step-project.com/showthread.php?tid=2475&pid=36961#pid36961

[Vond]

That's quite the necropost, this thread was from September last year

[Agnusthemagi]

Lol, it really is, my bad I just reached it from the possibly related threads from the post about memory optimizers, forgot to check on the date.