FFXIV Crash resulting from 32bit memory addressing Limit

[Gulkeeva]

(system information at bottom)


From my many many hours of playing FFXIV, I've noticed it will crash after being left on about 32-48 hours. At first I was thinking it may be something ingame but I was wondering what was causing it. I check task manager and I noticed FFXIV is using about 800MB ram with a 1.4GB swap file while I'm alone with no one around.

Restarting ffxiv its memory is like 250-300MB and a swap file of like 400-500MB.

This leads me to believe, FFXIV actively caches and stores every single thing you have ever come in contact with into memory, and at some point when it gets near its 2GB 32bit address limit it will cause the game to crash and or the PC to crash.

I'll try to post a picture of this later on as I've left my ffxiv on for over 2 days now (when i get home) to show how massive it is over time.


I'm sure someone will complain about "why not turn it off when gone" etc, I like to leave my character on to bazaar my stuff, and also to read back a bit on any LS chat that scrolls back like 5000 lines of text to see if anything important may have come up.


Windows 7 64bit Premium
8GB Ram
Radeon 5870
3.8 Ghz i-930
Sound blaster live X-gamer


--edit
Going to have to delay the pic post, gamae had already crashed when I got back sitting at BW , will post pic later on in a day or so!

[Gulkeeva]

Image of ffxiv after without closing the game (the earlier game crash halfed the memory usage but it built up quickly as it never closed the game out)

This is what my mem usage looks like usually around 32 hours (I travel all 3 cities, walk to aethers etc)

1.7GB-1.8GB
Game gets a little laggy at some points.
http://www.neko-sentai.com/images9ruf/48hr.jpg

1.1GB
This is after restarting the game
http://www.neko-sentai.com/images9ruf/Restart.jpg

when the "commit" and 'working" equal about 2GB ffxiv crashes.
This may not be a every day issue but it may explain why people crash... as ffxiv tends to load EVERYTHING and keeps everything in memory cached... till it crashes.

let me know if links don't lead to ffxiv images properly, should be though!)

[Grit]

Good eye.

Memory caching issues may be the cause of a lot of people's crashes, even when they haven't been logged into the game for too long. But that's not as certain.

[Crowley]

I had massive memory issues starting out. Was running 4GB (2x2) and found some errors after running memtest.

Switched to (1GBx2) low latency RAM and I never seem to dip below 1500MB used. Never get the error code/crash anymore. (0x005...) or whatever the access denied/cannot execute address error is.

[Eekiki]

I knew it! I knew there were memory leaks in this game! Vindication at last!

It looks like SE has plugged a lot of them, though. I haven't dealt with a random crash in a long time. I haven't started my hardcore wandering around yet, though (that will change once I get to R50).

Also: <3 Gulkeeva, and I am not ashamed to say I love your website!

[Gulkeeva]

haha thanks, the issue overall isn't exactly a memory leak ballooning to some obscene size and crashing its just ffxiv loads.. and loads everything, it does not clear out stuff.

Like if you visit gridania, on monday and don't ever go back... on wednesday gridania is still sitting in your memory.This may help load the area faster when you go back to it, but it adds to the 2GB limit ffxiv is restricted to (or in some cases for older machines with less memory) a faster hit of that limit causing people to crash.

A good example was during christmas with the graphic/data intensive tree's and snow. It caused people alot of issues (the many fansite forums had many complaints of crashes).

and no its not bad memory, I did a memory test long ago and their fine (that and i've used 64bit programs that go way over 2GB without any crashing issues) Think I got sony vegas up to 5GB once too... O_o

[Xophious]

Greetings everyone!

The thread was moved over from In-Game Bugs to Technical Support. Very good eye! There may be assistance here which can help prevent any further crashes due to the memory cap. I wish you the best!

- Xophious

[TwistedAx]

A way to extend time between crashes, if you have 3+GB of ram.

Could enable the /LAA (Large Address Aware) flag, though i don't know if it would be acceptable by SE, due to having to turn the flag on inside the game .exe itself.

SE could and should (as any respectable developer does anymore now days) enable the flag by default, without any adverse effects to users. This would be a <5 Min edit for a programmer.

I've patched many applications (Firefox, etc) and game .exe's (Single player, Offline games) with the /LAA flag and it can very well make a massive difference. Particularly on load times, and in normally laggy areas.

What /LAA does is, it removes the 32bit 2GB address area cap, and lets the program access the max amount of address area any 32bit program can potentially use, which is 4GB.

How Address Area is calculated:
Peripherals (Graphics cards, Sound cards) are accounted for first, though anymore usually only 256~MB is addressed at a time and the drivers handle the rest to save on Accessible Address Area,
Followed by Ram, usually.
4096MB - 256MB = 3840MB of addressable area left, which is why you usually only see 3.2-3.8gb with 4GB installed in a 32bit system.


My System Specs:
Core i7 950 D0 @4ghz
12GB G.Skill Ripjaws 2000mhz 9-9-9-24 1T Ram
Rampage III Formula
SLI 2x eVga GTX 480 SC+'s
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
2 300GB 10k RPM Velociraptor HHD's (Raid-0)
3 External 2TB HDD's for backups, media and blah blah
ProDigy Hi-Fi 7.1 modded tubes with Bur Brown Op-Amps (Sound Card)
24GB PageFile on Dedicated HDD (same drive for dedicated Linux-Swap)


P.S.: <3 Gulkeeva and Neko-Sentai

P.S.S.: Hoping for Moderator reply on this subject.

[Grit]

Twisted, can you explain why there would be a 2GB max memory addressing limit on games to begin with?

I suppose I could google it, but you seem to know a bit about the subject.

[TwistedAx]

The limit is placed due to the limited amount of ram a 32bit system can access in the first place, absolute max addressable space being 4GB, The purpose of this is to make sure the OS has enough ram of its own to operate, and it usually likes to keep 2GB to itself if possible.

/LAA lets the OS know that that particular program has been given rights to see the rest of the ram past 2GB imposed limit

It also occurs to me I forgot to mention for 32bit systems (ONLY 32bit systems):
/3G is a flag in the OS itself (use ONLY in 32bit OS's), when enabled it limits the OS to 1GB of ram, letting other programs see 3GB of ram. Good idea to have a larger PageFile if you use this, as you should if you are using /LAA on 32bit, or risk system crashes and errors.

In a nutshell.