heavy sims keep crash/freezing/using up all my memory

[Funkenhausen]

sims like earth & 2000 moons start off good and slow, but eventually the program crashes or just hangs up my PC. Keeps using 99% of my system memory, not sure if this is a memory leak or i just need more ram.

[Jar]

I'm not sure which other sims you're running, but Earth & 2000 moons is under the Stress Tests category and is an extraordinarily intense simulation that we don't expect to run well on normal hardware. Of course, ideally none of these sims should cause a crash, no matter how intense, but if you're seeing issues with them, I'd recommend sticking to the more normal simulations. :)

[Funkenhausen]

Normal sims are boring. i think we can agree on that. can you explain the ram usage? is it normal for US2 to try and use all available ram? i have 16GB. or is this a mem leak? also, what kind of pc config would you recommend for the stress tests like earth & 5k moons?

[Jar]

The stress tests aren't meant to run normally. I'm not sure there is any consumer hardware available right now that could run those sims smoothly. We tucked them away in "Stress Tests" for those who may be curious, but we don't recommend them as part of the standard Universe Sandbox experience.

We're unfortunately limited by how much performance we can get when it comes to simulating gravity and motion for lots of objects. It's very computationally expensive.

[ΗΞΧATαηταlνs]

I would check your Windows task manager's performance tab when outside of the game to see how much memory your operating system and other installed/running applications are using and potentially close any non-essential software besides Steam and Universe Sandbox when trying to play the game. I have 32 GB of DDR4 2133 MHz RAM in my system and Universe Sandbox never uses anywhere close to the maximum. You could also try download the diagnostic application called "MemTest64" and running that with all non-essential applications closed (and the game closed) to diagnose any problems with your RAM. Safe link to download MemTest64: https://www.techpowerup.com/memtest64/

[Funkenhausen]

the memory usage isnt consistent. sometimes the game will only use about 8-9gb for those big sims (which are still sims btw, not just stress tests). other times it will use over 11gb and more the longer the sim runs. the sim will stop essentially while data is being swapped from ram to pagefile.

@yopo
try running the earth & 2000 or 5000 moons and see how much ram it uses on your system.

[Roderik]

We are simulating very intricate aspects of objects, not just gravity.
It is completely normal that these extreme simulations use a lot of main memory.
Jar explained very clearly that these simulation are stress tests.
They are purposefully created to push even the most expensive hardware to its limits.

[ΗΞΧATαηταlνs]

Indeed, if MemTest64 shows no errors with your RAM and you're only getting very-high RAM usage from Universe Sandbox if you run the stress test simulations (with thousands of simulated objects) then there's no problem with your memory nor the game, physics calculations are very taxing on CPU and RAM when there's that many objects being simulated. It's just a huge amount of math.

[Funkenhausen]

understood. thanks for clarifying. any possibility that we will see CUDA/OpenCL come back to US2 in the future? I really miss the now unavailable version 12.1 because i used to run a 100x100 giant fragment grid with gravity and it never crashed nor used up all my ram. I would let it run for days and watch multiple systems form. i also had max simulated bodies set to 2048 and non-simulated to 4096.