How I fixed MY system's Memory Leak while playing 7DTD

[Mhaegadeth]

SO, I encountered something over the last couple of days which had me baffled and had me convinced I had at last, after 1500+hrs of flawless gameplay, encountered the Legendary Memory Leak. The symptoms were as follows:
Normal login and normal (expected) gameplay for first few minutes...
>>>after the 'few minutes' passed my game began to hitch and hang for several (many) seconds before continuing,
>>> Building/construction was not appearing in real time (delayed by minutes in some cases) >>> Then the game began to freeze for minutes. If an attempt at gameplay continued then the game would ultimately crash, my system would notify me I was low on memory and would then freeze completely- to the point where even a task manager request was out of the question.
I have always, ALWAYS had my game set to 1080 on Ultra settings and this was happening even when I reduced every setting to LOW settings. I did every performance tweak I could find on the web (relative to 7DTD and Windows gamers), uninstalled, reinstalled, added a hard drive and moved install locations, ...I mean, I've been PC'ing since there have been PCs so believe me when I say, "I tried EVERYTHING".
I thought about the most recent changes I had made to my PC and my 7Days-world and it got me looking for another reason...my PC tested out fine after benchmarking, monitoring and proofing my hardware...it handled a full on session of Arma 3 just fine, so......
I'll see if I can attach a picture of my base to illustrate what I am going to describe here... but I have a "tower" that rises from bedrock and sits in the middle of a pit that rises up about 150m to ground level and extends another 50m beyond. Within this tower I have many levels and tiers of different activities, mechanical rooms, workshops and plantations. On one of these levels, approx 65m below ground level, I decided to fill up a business-glass block and concrete room within this tower with buckets of water and make an illuminated, transparent swimming pool suspended up in the air. This space was 9x9x4 blocks large, or, approx 325 blocks. 325 buckets of water. and yes, I build or craft everything and I had to make about 9 trips to the pond with nothing but buckets. At times I got tired of this and took a couple of breaks away from my pool project and just let off to town for looting. After I logged off the second time, I noticed my 'tower' was very slow in loading and I had developed a 'stutter' in my framerates. I had just installed an Nvidia game ready driver and suspected that immediately.
I rolled my driver back and to my horror discovered the problem was MUCH worse. I finished emptying my load of buckets and left the tower to refill...I noticed most of my tower STILL hadnt finished loading after 20 minutes inside of it fighting buckets and massive system hangs. But once I left the tower, my frames got a lot better.
I'll run out of room before I can tell the whole story but here's the gist: Emptying buckets of water around my steps, lights and contours had created mini-waterfalls where the water level was irregular from block to block in spots. After playing with it some, the more irregular the water level-the more I had problems. I fought through 15+ system crashes and many more system hangs to prove what I began to suspect... Uneven water levels, or 'moving' water, causes MASSIVE problems and a memory leak for MY system, at the least. This would indicate a larger problem, to my mind anyways, but I hope it may help someone else who has been playing with water and lost their work because of an unplayable 'save'.

The resolution for ALL of my problems was to level out the water level in my pool with an even distribution of buckets and to 'mop up' all of the spill-over I had created by placing blocks inside of my water and buckets of water against outer walls. Dead serious....20+hrs of testing this out and I'm back to 100% features and playability again just by doing that. NOTE: This happened even with water at LOW, reflections OFF, and water particles set to 0%.

I7-7700
8GB Ram
GTX 1060 GB

No way to attach a pic apparently so I'll put a couple in my screenshots or send you one for anyone who is interested. Just let me know....
<PEACE-OUT>

[...👑 JOST AMMAN 👑...]

This is a very interesting discovery...
I hope that when they go back to rework on water this will be fixed. :-|

[SylenThunder]

What driver version are you running?

Both 397.31 and 397.64 are known to tank FPS in 7DTD.
The current recommended driver version for Nvidia GPU's is 391.35.

[YamaKami]

They removed the flowing water becasue it was a huge performance hit. Dropped me down to 3fps in the chunk where we tried to fill a cave with the lake.

In my most current game in A16 I have a large bridge and during construction we had to move and change it a bit. It created the 1 voxel sized waterfalls in the middle of the lake . Which I believe is what you are describing. However it has no effect on the fps at all.

What is more likely is in that area where you have made a massive structure with what sounds like lots going on. While at the settings you are using (read as too high), you are topping out on RAM with only 8GB. There is a reason the reccomended amount is 12GB. Lower your settings to avoid this. This game does use over 8GB at times, and that is not as leak.

[crpgnut]

With mods I've even tapped out my 16 gigs of ram and 8 gigs of VRAM :)

[Mhaegadeth]

Hey guys, I appreciate the feedback. My problem was not a one voxel waterfall though... It was about a 47 count in about 47 different locations. And I know some people have problems with only 8 gigabytes of RAM but I'm here to tell you between both of my accounts I have played this game for over 2000 hours on my ultra settings and have never had a problem. Sometimes on horde night I might knock my render distance down a little bit but seriously... I average about 40 to 60 frames per second unless it's horde night, sunrise or sunset ( my machine hiccups a little bit on God rays). And the purpose of my post was not to complain about frame rates. I love 7 days to die and have no frame rate problems whatsoever. The purpose of my post was to State what I had experienced with the understanding that someone might possibly be in a similar situation and find a similar resolution. I wasn't complaining about a problem. I was reporting what I did to fix it. I mopped up about 47 different voxel-based waterfalls and various other spillovers. That fixed my frame rates. Fixed the actual memory leak which ran my system out of memory. Once I fixed that? My game return to normal playability. 40 to 60 frames.

[YamaKami]

Originally posted by Mhaegadeth:

Hey guys, I appreciate the feedback. My problem was not a one voxel waterfall though... It was about a 47 count in about 47 different locations. And I know some people have problems with only 8 gigabytes of RAM but I'm here to tell you between both of my accounts I have played this game for over 2000 hours on my ultra settings and have never had a problem. Sometimes on horde night I might knock my render distance down a little bit but seriously... I average about 40 to 60 frames per second unless it's horde night, sunrise or sunset ( my machine hiccups a little bit on God rays). And the purpose of my post was not to complain about frame rates. I love 7 days to die and have no frame rate problems whatsoever. The purpose of my post was to State what I had experienced with the understanding that someone might possibly be in a similar situation and find a similar resolution. I wasn't complaining about a problem. I was reporting what I did to fix it. I mopped up about 47 different voxel-based waterfalls and various other spillovers. That fixed my frame rates. Fixed the actual memory leak which ran my system out of memory. Once I fixed that? My game return to normal playability. 40 to 60 frames.

The tl:dr you missed is this is 100% down to RAM.

[...👑 JOST AMMAN 👑...]

Originally posted by YamaKami:

The tl:dr you missed is this is 100% down to RAM.

I disagree. When the RAM is not enough the game simply CTD, you don't get less FPS.
RAM usage has nothing to do with FPS perfomance, GPU and CPU does.

I believe we might be up to something here, something about water that TFP could debug and try to fix sometime. Also TFP themselves have admitted water needs a re-write, so I'm not surprised that part of the coding may have some problems.

[YamaKami]

Originally posted by Jost Amman:

Originally posted by YamaKami:

The tl:dr you missed is this is 100% down to RAM.

I disagree. When the RAM is not enough the game simply CTD, you don't get less FPS.
RAM usage has nothing to do with FPS perfomance.

I believe we might be up to something here, something about water that TFP could debug and try to fix sometime. Also TFP themselves have admitted water needs a re-write, so I'm not surprised that part of the coding may have some problems.

You are incorrect then.

And water flowing was removed for the very reason it hinders performance. That much is on the table still to be completed.


As I mentioned above I have a map with the same issue and I do not have the performance issue. I do have double the amount of RAM though. We also know this game does not leak, but RWG maps will continue to use more RAM as the are explored and modified to over 8GB worth of RAM, ESPECIALLY considering the settings the OP is using.

Water optimization will help when it is done. However this is still a lack of RAM issue cut and dry.

[...👑 JOST AMMAN 👑...]

:-)

[Mhaegadeth]

...because you know....for two years I have had awesome playability and no shortage of RAM...until juuussst..you know what.....nevermind. *smh* Thanks for the input, regardless. I wasn't there, I guess. I wouldn't know what I was talking about.

[YamaKami]

Originally posted by Mhaegadeth:

...because you know....for two years I have had awesome playability and no shortage of RAM...until juuussst..you know what.....nevermind. *smh* Thanks for the input, regardless. I wasn't there, I guess. I wouldn't know what I was talking about.

The RAM requirement was not 12GB recommended 2 years ago. That changed for A16. There isn't any leak in A16. Your have described what happens when you nearly exceed the amount of RAM you have, when you do it crashes. And you know what you observed for certain. You describe it well. It is also well clear you do not understand what happened though despite your observations. Feel free to re-read what I have posted if you're still not getting it yet. Or ask a question if there is a specific part I can try explain to you better.

[Mhaegadeth]

Okay, I'm frankly juuuuust about done with this 'conversation'. I posted this to help people in the very first place, wasn't looking for a kudos from a basement keyboard-troll, and you apparently haven't read crap but what you wanted to see... "Uhhh..lag, uh,..8gm ram (I'm SUPER DEE DUPER AWESOME BECAUSE I HAVE DOUBLE THE RAM...did you catch that, World? On this post that 2 people are reading I showed this old man up because I have double the RAM he does..okay..umm..lessee..lag, ram,..uh.oh yeah I can show how much longer I played this game too..."

Dude...you didn't read ♥♥♥♥ I wrote. You just wanted to one-up someone and make yourself feel good about it and hopefully get a few more instagram followers. The fact is, I stated how I fixed 'MYYYYYYY" system's 'Memory Leak',....I never said 7DTD had one, I didn't just 'poof' create my tower in God Mode either. I have built on it for months (mining 62000 reinforced concrete blocks worth of stone) and have built several lesser versions over the thousands of hours of perfect gameplay. I have always played on my listed settings and this 'lag' was NEVER present (you didn't read that far...you scanned for RAM and lag-remember?), much less even an issue. I began dumping hundreds of buckets of water into the tower and the problems began. I stated the experience very clearly, as you noted. Too bad you didn't read the experience as far as you implied or you would have also noted that I tried about everything you could think of- including fresh installs...all the n00b stuff you probably would advise on another post... and I also tried lowering every possible setting to the bare minimum. I would certainly think 8gb of RAM could handle the inside of a concrete room for more than a few minutes rendering at 800x600 when it previously had been dutifully helping to render it at nearly maxxed out settings for a consistent two years prior. C'mon man, THINK. This IS a little bit different than your favorite targets. Whether you think so or not, I seriously couldn't give a flying rats a$$. But there's my rebuttal. My smoke is about out so I'm gonna wrap this up.
NOW, as far as the helpfulness of your comments: I appreciate all input. Yours was not offered in help or in an attempt to offer some insight. It was a self-gratifying troll of someone honestly trying to offer a different experience to shed some light on performance issues. Be that as it may, thanks for taking the time anyways.
As far as motive...bah...does anyone even care? Pffft...I think that what we have learned here is that you either need 1) to learn how to configure a computer better 2) You need a better computer

[YamaKami]

Originally posted by Mhaegadeth:

Okay, I'm frankly juuuuust about done with this 'conversation'. I posted this to help people in the very first place, wasn't looking for a kudos from a basement keyboard-troll, and you apparently haven't read crap but what you wanted to see... "Uhhh..lag, uh,..8gm ram (I'm SUPER DEE DUPER AWESOME BECAUSE I HAVE DOUBLE THE RAM...did you catch that, World? On this post that 2 people are reading I showed this old man up because I have double the RAM he does..okay..umm..lessee..lag, ram,..uh.oh yeah I can show how much longer I played this game too..."

Dude...you didn't read ♥♥♥♥ I wrote. You just wanted to one-up someone and make yourself feel good about it and hopefully get a few more instagram followers. The fact is, I stated how I fixed 'MYYYYYYY" system's 'Memory Leak',....I never said 7DTD had one, I didn't just 'poof' create my tower in God Mode either. I have built on it for months (mining 62000 reinforced concrete blocks worth of stone) and have built several lesser versions over the thousands of hours of perfect gameplay. I have always played on my listed settings and this 'lag' was NEVER present (you didn't read that far...you scanned for RAM and lag-remember?), much less even an issue. I began dumping hundreds of buckets of water into the tower and the problems began. I stated the experience very clearly, as you noted. Too bad you didn't read the experience as far as you implied or you would have also noted that I tried about everything you could think of- including fresh installs...all the n00b stuff you probably would advise on another post... and I also tried lowering every possible setting to the bare minimum. I would certainly think 8gb of RAM could handle the inside of a concrete room for more than a few minutes rendering at 800x600 when it previously had been dutifully helping to render it at nearly maxxed out settings for a consistent two years prior. C'mon man, THINK. This IS a little bit different than your favorite targets. Whether you think so or not, I seriously couldn't give a flying rats a$$. But there's my rebuttal. My smoke is about out so I'm gonna wrap this up.
NOW, as far as the helpfulness of your comments: I appreciate all input. Yours was not offered in help or in an attempt to offer some insight. It was a self-gratifying troll of someone honestly trying to offer a different experience to shed some light on performance issues. Be that as it may, thanks for taking the time anyways.
As far as motive...bah...does anyone even care? Pffft...I think that what we have learned here is that you either need 1) to learn how to configure a computer better 2) You need a better computer

I tried being polite and explaining that there is no leak, and that you are the one that needs help. You appear unable to accept that though, and have turned to insults. Good luck in life you're going to need it...


Anyone reading this thread disregard the OP as they do not know what they speak of.

[...👑 JOST AMMAN 👑...]

I think, despite the different aproaches and opinions, we're all trying to achieve the same goal here: to make 7DTD a better (and more stable) game in the future.

My concern regarding OP is that there may actually be something that needs fixing with the current water implementation (maybe waterfalls dropping FPS and eating RAM?).

The fact that (we think) our interpretation of OP's description of what happened seems right to us doesn't mean IMO we should ignore the possibility of the other one's being the right one.

I may be wrong and Yama could be right, my point is I'm concerned that IF there is a problem with water that is not reported to TFP we will have a worse game in the future.

[YamaKami]

Originally posted by Jost Amman:

I think, despite the different aproaches and opinions, we're all trying to achieve the same goal here: to make 7DTD a better (and more stable) game in the future.

My concern regarding OP is that there may actually be something that needs fixing with the current water implementation (maybe waterfalls dropping FPS and eating RAM?).

The fact that (we think) our interpretation of OP's description of what happened seems right to us doesn't mean IMO we should ignore the possibility of the other one's being the right one.

I may be wrong and Yama could be right, my point is I'm concerned that IF there is a problem with water that is not reported to TFP we will have a worse game in the future.

Water is a place holder as is. So that much is not a concern, and as I said I have had the same thing and not been slowed to a crawl in A16. The other fellow is trying to fill in blanks with word they do not understand like leak and then further confusing things with more assumptions.