Screen Freeze, Garbage Collection, Memory Leak Oh My! (help please)

[Garoun]

3 Issues I'm having and I believe they are all intertwined.

When I first log in the Titan Performance meter says my memory is at 88megs used, within 15-20min that number climbs to 109 whether I'm standing perfectly still or moving. The system has my garbage collection threshold right around 109 megs so I'm sure it could easily climb higher if I allowed it to. When the GC kicks in it causes my screen to completely lock up until the collection is finished, and naturally my character just keeps running and often gets me killed or puts me somewhere I have no clue how I got to.

Questions:
1) Any addon/Mod or way that I can see the Memory signature and usage on a 'per mod' basis which would help me track down what mod(s) are causing the memory to burn so fast when I'm doing absolutely nothing.

2) Any idea how to correct the issue of severe screen freeze hitting when the Garbage Collection kicks in (I have 2 gigs of Corsair memory on the way which should help)

3) Any ideas, besides of course wiping out every mod and starting from scratch, on how to decipher what mod or mods is causing the load to increase exponentially. (Tied to #1 basically)

Thanks in advance!

[Cirk]

Originally Posted by Garoun 1) Any addon/Mod or way that I can see the Memory signature and usage on a 'per mod' basis which would help me track down what mod(s) are causing the memory to burn so fast when I'm doing absolutely nothing.

I don't know of any way to establish per-mod memory usage apart from unloading each one in turn and looking at the memory used. Unfortunately I think the leak probelm is in the client or Blizzard UI itself. I tried investigating this using the following macro:

/script local u,g=gcinfo();if (u and g) then ChatFrame1:AddMessage("used: "..u.." (gc at "..g..")");end

Which will show in your default chat tab the current memory used and the current garbage collection level. Even with all mods disabled in the Addons screen, I found that my memory usage was going up with time. I haven't tried deleting my Interface or WTF folders entirely to try this though (although I wouldn't expect this to be a factor).

I also haven't posted this finding on the WoW bug reports or technical support forums, which I probably should do (unless you'd like to Garoun ).

Originally Posted by Garoun 2) Any idea how to correct the issue of severe screen freeze hitting when the Garbage Collection kicks in (I have 2 gigs of Corsair memory on the way which should help)

The GC level is set automatically from what I can tell, to be a few megs more than the current usage when the GC occurs. You can see this with the above macro that after you hit the GC point, your GC limit will have increased slightly. I'm not sure if more memory would help the GC process (I suspect the pause is due to CPU processing alone), or how you'd set the GC limit manually. Reducing how much memory your addons are using in total would probably help though (which means either more memory efficient addons, or less addons).

Originally Posted by Garoun 3) Any ideas, besides of course wiping out every mod and starting from scratch, on how to decipher what mod or mods is causing the load to increase exponentially. (Tied to #1 basically)

Nothing more I can think of...

-- Cirk

[Garoun]

Ok that helps, and I managed to slow the bleeding by getting rid of an addon called TrainerSkills for now. We'll see how long that lasts.

Do you know if old saved variables files from addon's I removed hurt anything when left in the SavedVariables folders or does the UI by default cache all files in that directory so it has them if it needs them?

[Industrial]

With 25 addons I use 10 to 16 MB of RAM. I guess your setup is a little screwed up. But then again i go for the minimal... wich is good... 100 mb lmao...
/me snickers and wanders off

Edit:
I'm now at 43 addons. 16MB of ram usage. Beat that i dare anyone.

[Vudoo]

Here's an addon that I use to check how much memoery each addon is using on loadup.

!Warmup: http://ui.worldofwar.net/ui.php?id=1644

It was written by Tekkub, who is a very good programmer and frequent poster in the wowace forums.

- Vudoo

[JIM the Inventor]

Originally Posted by Cirk The GC level is set automatically from what I can tell, to be a few megs more than the current usage when the GC occurs. You can see this with the above macro that after you hit the GC point, your GC limit will have increased slightly. I'm not sure if more memory would help the GC process (I suspect the pause is due to CPU processing alone), or how you'd set the GC limit manually. Reducing how much memory your addons are using in total would probably help though (which means either more memory efficient addons, or less addons).

That is entirely correct.

Blizzard is the one that has set the GC threshhold. From what I can tell, they are using this function from the LUA language itself.

It would be nice if someone could correct me on this, but I expect we cannot touch this function, since AddOn authors work within the WoW "API", which is a level or two removed from the underlying LUA / C language.