Is memory leak from a game going to make my computer worse?

[Flamebeard]

Hi everyone, I just experienced my first memory leak while playing Just Cause 1 (or at least what it's referred by other people that have played it in the past). After about an hour or so playing the game, it sorts of stutters and freezes for a few seconds and then it's back and it does this until you exit the game and restart it.

I'm wondering if this is something I should be concerned with for my PC.

[Daisy]

Hi IceGatorDude,

No need to worry - the memory leak means the game has been allocating memory, then lost track of it, so its unable to free it. Think of it like having a pile of paper where you makes notes on whilst doing some work, and you lose one of the sheets of paper - but each time you do a new job, you get a new notebook. So whilst you may run out of paper on this job if you keep losing sheets, the next job (or next time you run the game), you'll have a brand new notebook.

Most memory leaks are completely recovered when you exit the game - Windows is able to free up the memory that the program lost track of. In the worse case (these are rare but possible), if Windows is unable to do so, a reboot will restore everything. Nothing is physically lost or damaged on your system RAM.

NOTE: It *is* possible for some misbehaving programs to overwrite memory in another program - Windows should provide protection against this, and you can also enable DEP via the System Control Panel (Advanced Tab -> Performance -> System Security) to help. Effectively this is similar to how some viruses work - its highly unusual for a game to behave this way, so I don't think you've anything to worry about. But in this worse case, you may have other data in memory corrupted - sometimes this will result in a blue screen (so at least you know about it), worse case it will be silent and could corrupt a file.

But as I say, its highly unlikely that a game will be misbehaving in a way that evades the cross-process memory protection in Windows.


If Just Cause is the only game that behaves this way, its unlikely you have something physically wrong with your machine. If you want to check it, there are CPU, GPU and Memory test tools you can run to make sure your machine is working properly:

Prime95 will stress test your CPU and make sure its functioning correctly
MemTest will stress test your RAM and make sure its functioning correctly
FurMark will stress test your GPU and make sure its functioning correctly

If all 3 of these pass, you're fine. If its only Just Cause, I'd be 99% certain you're fine.


Hope this puts your mind to rest!

[Flamebeard]

Ah ok :) thank you very much Daisy. I have looked this up and it appears to be a bug within the game that has been apparent since it came out. Thanks for making sure that it won't harm my PC in anyway. :)