System Resource problems?

Okay, here's the deal. It's a bit complicated, so bear with me.
I've been running 3.17 for a while now, and I'm running it on this ol' laptop of mine, with only 64 megs of ram to it's name. If I run one world, I'm fine. If I run two, after a couple of hours, I begin to run into problems. My system starts lagging and the text gets compressed off to one side of the screen. I found that this was because of system resource problems, after talking to some people who actually have a clue about this stuff. I could close down everything but MC, and I would still be running at 15% resources, out of a usual eighty or so. Needless to say, this isn't a good thing.
So I closed everything 'cept mushclient. No change. I closed Mushclient. My resources jump from fifteen percent to sixty five.
Hmm. So, I'll sum it up.
Two worlds in Mushclient at once, for a couple of hours, eats up system resources like there's no tomorrow for some reason. One world is fine. The problem only goes away when I close MC completely. Someone described this as a 'memory leak', but I just thought I'd bring it to all of your attention, for us with low-end systems. <=)

I have had this report a couple of times, and it is hard to investigate, as memory allocation tends to be "mushy", that is, hard to put a finger on.

I don't believe there is a memory leak, however the evidence points to memory being consumed at a larger rate than it should be.

When I run MUSHclient in the debugger, and look at reported memory leaks, there aren't any, however I agree that it seems to consume memory faster than I expect.

Unfortunately operating systems "behind the scenes" can do things that the program doesn't expect.

You could try reducing the number of lines kept in the output buffer - you haven't said how many you currently have - and see if that helps.

I've only got about 700 lines in the buffer, for both worlds. Anything longer than that, I just log the bloody thing. I don't know why it only happens with two worlds open, but that's the only time it occurs. And in terms of background processes, I shut down everything else (Firewall, connection, all my system tray icons, my office toolbar, etc.) and then looked at it. The figures I mentioned above were effectively the ones that I got. 20% jumping to 75% on MC's close.

It's strange, that's for sure.

Looking at my own copy which is running under Windows NT 4, it has been up for 8 days continuously with 5 worlds open, only uses 6148K of memory (ie. about 4 Mb). I have more than 64 Mb of RAM, but if I did have 64 Mb that would be around 11% of system resources.

I haven't been all that busy, but I have more than two lots of 700 lines in the open worlds:

World 1 - 1389 lines
World 2 - 420 lines
World 3 - 480 lines
World 4 - 866 lines
World 5 - 1 line

Total: 3156 lines


A couple of other people have reported similar problems, but it is hard to reproduce here (of course, that means that thousands are *not* having the problem).

Maybe you are doing something differently that consumes a lot of memory. If I could find out what, I could fix it. Maybe:

• Opening and closing worlds a lot
• Using scripting a lot
• Having many triggers
• Maybe a small buffer is making the problem worse - try using a large output buffer size
• Copying and pasting a lot
• Using MXP/Pueblo

Any research you can do that shows what is likely to make the memory usage go up would be helpful.

When you say "running one world is fine" you could run two copies of MUSHclient (one for each world). If only one uses a lot of memory then it is something specific to that world, and we can work out what that thing is.

I once had the same problem. I was using java script with two windows. One was running heavily with the scripts. The other basically idled.

I solved this problem by moving my scripts to C++ code with automation technology and increasing my machine's memory to 512M.

I noticed that when the MUSHclient's memory usage is high, minimize the application will bring the memory usage down to normal. I kept watching this for many times. So I believe the memory usage is not caused by the MUSHclient application itself, but by other system reason.

One reason might be the memory collection does not occur very often. I do not know this is a simply java script problem or M$ application problem.

You also don't say whether or not you are running an operating system that uses the 9x kernel (95, 98, ME) or the NT kernel (NT4, 2000, XP). Under systems with the 9x kernel, there is a 64K resource limit that will cause problems like this (resources running lower than you might expect, the OS/programs reporting that they are low on memory when you think you have a lot free) and the like.

I ran into this repeatedly under my 98 Second Edition install and switched to the XP Professional OS. The NT kernel eliminates the resource problem, removes the 512MB RAM cap, and is in general far more stable. You might want to look at this option, but before doing so make sure that your software functions correctly under the OS you want to switch to -- some games don't like NT/2000...

You will have to get used to NT's slightly different placements of control panels (the Device manager is in a very different place in 2K/XP for instance) and far tighter security model, plus NTFS disks don't show up when you boot under, say, a 98SE CD-ROM (I did this recently to get a clean boot environment for an EEPROM flasher utility).

I've only had one "out of the blue" MUSHClient crash so far, the OS didn't fall down and go boom around it, and MUSHClient works as it should.