Steam is suffering from a memory leak.

[GameZone]

When downloading something from Steam my "Standby memory" (Cached data) fills up. I guess this is normal. But once the download has finished the memory never goes back to normal, unless I flush it trough some third party app. The result is stuttering in games I play after downloading something trough Steam.

I thought this might be a Windows problem, so I tested it against other launchers like Origin. And yes, the "Standby memory" fills up there too, but the different is that once it`s over everything goes back to normal.

In other words, Steam are my memory leak source, and a clean format doesn't help. You should be aware of this and test it out yourself.

[aiusepsi]

That isn't a memory leak. A memory leak is where a process allocates memory from the OS and then forgets to free it (to release it back to the OS) when it's finished.

Standby memory is different; it's where a process has released a memory page back to the operating system, but because that page is a mirror of a file on disk, the OS decides to keep it resident in RAM. The thinking goes that if someone else needs that page from that file in future, the time spent loading it in from disk can be saved because it's already loaded into RAM. That's why it's also described as "cached data", it's an in-memory cache of things that are also on disk. Windows will even prefetch stuff into RAM that it thinks you might need; that also goes into the standby list; they call that feature "SuperFetch".

I don't know what exactly is the cause of your stuttering; having use of the OS memory allocator on a game's critical path would strike me as a very bad idea for performance under any circumstances, so I'd have thought game devs would avoid it.

[GameZone]

Originally posted by aiusepsi:

That isn't a memory leak. A memory leak is where a process allocates memory from the OS and then forgets to free it (to release it back to the OS) when it's finished.

Standby memory is different; it's where a process has released a memory page back to the operating system, but because that page is a mirror of a file on disk, the OS decides to keep it resident in RAM. The thinking goes that if someone else needs that page from that file in future, the time spent loading it in from disk can be saved because it's already loaded into RAM. That's why it's also described as "cached data", it's an in-memory cache of things that are also on disk. Windows will even prefetch stuff into RAM that it thinks you might need; that also goes into the standby list; they call that feature "SuperFetch".

I don't know what exactly is the cause of your stuttering; having use of the OS memory allocator on a game's critical path would strike me as a very bad idea for performance under any circumstances, so I'd have thought game devs would avoid it.

Thanks, pardon my mistake.

Although the problem remains the same. With other clients the cached memory releases itself once the downloading has finished. With Steam that doesn't happen, and that's causing games to stutter.