Memory leak and crash on Win8 (?) boxes

[miki151]

It might be caused by something specific that you're doing in your games. If you happen to play again, do you mind sending me a late-game save file? If the crash usually happens after 18k, then around turn 15k would be good.  The save file extensions is “kep”. Thanks!

[KnightZero]

Okay. I sent it to your extremic.com address which I hope is the right place. The process of saving and reloading seems to have changed the behavior of the bug a bit but not removed it completely.

[miki151]

I've been running your saved game on Win 8 and also in a debugging tool (valgrind) and can't seem to replicate the crash. Could you please confirm that the game crashes on your computer every time you just load that save and let it run? I ran the 17000 one. Thank you.

[Kazz]

Beginning to sound like a conflict with something else running on the PC.

[KnightZero]

I think that Kazz might be right, at least in my case. I can't replicate the crash when loading the saved game. Besides a decline in performance after running for a while, it runs fine. Maybe something about saving and reloading is changing something? At the same time I tried to replicate the crash from a saved state I did successfully replicate the crash in a game running from start to end without any saving or loading.

I'm not sure what on my computer could be causing conflicts though. It's an up to date copy of Win 8.1 and I'm not doing anything unusual on it. I've tried killing any processes started at boot which aren't tied directly to the OS but it hasn't changed the outcome so far.

[Kazz]

The normal culprits are drivers and AV/AM programs.  Check your audio and video drivers as well as your antivirus and any anti-malware you may be running.  Worst case, disable AV and AM while you play a game.  Just remember to turn them back on when you're finished!

If you've not done it in a while, it's a good time to check all your drivers with your PC vendor or PC components vendors.

Don't be afraid to run a full AV scan and a full AM (anti-malware) scan.  Check your browsers for junk add-ons, too.

[miki151]

Interesting. So these programs could be messing up the memory of another program?

[Kazz]

Two things:

1) Yes, anti-virus/anti-malware programs can hinder the proper operation of an executable, dll, etc as it's their inherent function.  All they have to do is suspect one is a possible threat and bang.

2) ANY program can affect another if it's poorly written.  If you have something with a memory leak, etc. it could very easily be affecting another running program's memory, interrupt, DMA, etc. access.  It's basically out of control.  And it may not be noticed by other programs because they aren't using those resources affected by the 'bad code'.

Stripping the startup of a PC to bare bones is a common way to sort out conflicts.

And it could be a lousy mouse, soundcard, and/or graphics driver, easily.

[LTK]

I started up the game for the first time just now and all of my RAM filled up within a minute, then after another minute the pagefile had maxed out my SSD and programs were crashing left and right. Even Minecraft never made it this bad! I restarted my computer and started up the game to track the memory use and this was the result. I had to close the game when it got too high.

Interestingly, I'm running Windows 7 (although this laptop was built for Windows 8, but that's probably not relevant) so it's strange that the problem is so much more severe here. The memory leak starts once I'm in-game and continues even while the game is paused. Disabling AV/AM has no effect. Happens regardless of game mode or whether monsters are aggressive. Also, any attempt to quit the game results in a crash, and the crash.log only says FATAL :0 FATAL :0 FATAL :0

Any suggestions? I would really like to play this game.

Some more info: I can quit the game without crashing in Alpha 7 but the memory leak remains, Alpha 6 does not have the memory leak and works fine.

[miki151]

Laptop again… It looks like it's a driver problem, especially that you mention it started with Alpha7, which is when I added textured GUI. So it's either a bug in the library or in the way the game talks with the library. Thanks for the report. I'll investigate.

[benexclaimed]

Tried Alpha 9 (first version I've tried) and it crashes (without any error message) during the 'building a world' load screen when I select adventure mode. I turned on Windows 7 compatibility mode (I'm running Win 8.1) and this time it crashes and shows “FATAL:0”.

[miki151]

Yup, I just fixed that, will upload a new version soon. It's a completely different bug though.

[LTK]

Ah, I just tried running KeeperRL with the Nvidia graphics card instead of the integrated graphics and that didn't cause any problems on Alpha 8. So it must be something about the integrated graphics driver that doesn't play well with KeeperRL.

[miki151]

I fixed one issue that could have been causing this. If any of you have a chance to try the last release let me know.

[JohnBarleycorn]

I have encountered a similar problem where is starts of fine until it eventually crashes my computer due to too much memory usage, though the playing I have done was excellent!

[Author]

Posts