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Cities: Skylines >  Workshop > thale5's Workshop > Loading Screen Mod > Discussions
Loading Screen Mod
Description Discussions93 Comments3445 Change Notes
Pharaonkheops 17 May, 2020 @ 8:46am
Strange memory behavior
Hello, the mod spots a strange behavior from my memory.
On my PC, RAM is 16G and Pagefile defined at 32G on a M2 SSD.
8 DLC (missing Snow, Disaster, Green and Harbour along with radio stuff). 1378 Assets (full workshop content directory is about 3.5G)
When the game loads a city, both figures go up on a balanced way (I mean RAM used and PF used are almost equal). Wich seams a first strange thing tmho.
At around 12G of used RAM, numbers become orange (wich make sense since when I play, free RAM is between 15 and 16G just before game start). At that point there is a short stall then assets are starting to load and before the mem stats have changed, they turn red. And this is when the strangest behavior starts. The RAM numbers goes down (to 0 sometime but usually around 500M) while pagefile mem is going up and up and up to a max of almost 20. Just before the loading ends, the used RAM goes up again to about 3G. Numbers stay red whatever the values.
Merging stuff params don't have any effects.
What am I doing wrong
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Showing 1-8 of 8 comments
ratty32 17 May, 2020 @ 2:21pm 
Having same issue as person above me, removed some mods i wasnt using and dropped my assets down but getting same thing. Seems almost like a memory dump then game just hangs
#1
A-mak 18 May, 2020 @ 3:22am 
The game is loading, windows starts to reserve pagefile like any other program. Loading hit's orange, windows is running out of available memory, loading hits red, it's dumped as much of the system as possible into pagefile and continues to load. The game finish's loading and windows calculates that unused assets can remain in pagefile, it lowers the reserved ram and the game runes at the stable 3gb.

I would suggest you use this mod and see what's really not optimized and ditching it.
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=453956891&searchtext=mod+info
#2
Pharaonkheops 18 May, 2020 @ 8:17am 
Thank you for that clear answer.
Actually, 3G/16 of RAM charge and ~20G/32 of PF charge are not that heavy. But why are the numbers keeping red? Or maybe, the RAM amount is the only one that matters (which means the mods consider this 3+20 as a whole 23 wich is effectively too much upon a mere 15G of RAM?
#3
thale5  [developer] 18 May, 2020 @ 8:32am 
@Pharaonkheops Nothing strange in your description, working as expected.

Please notice that the loading screen *DOES NOT* display page file usage. It displays virtual memory usage (and RAM usage).

Virtual memory usage is expected to grow steadily when additional content is loaded. More content means more memory usage.

RAM usage, on the other hand, is managed by your operating system. When the OS sees that one app is requesting more and more memory, it starts to give it less and less RAM, basically punishing it. It does this to keep the system operational, I suppose. Anyway, the decision is made in the operating system kernel.

I put the red color on the loading screen for a reason. The OS is rather aggressive if you push the computer too hard.

You can monitor the memory figures in Windows Task Manager / Details, too. "Private Working Set" is pretty much the same as RAM usage. "Commit Size" reflects virtual memory usage.
#4
thale5  [developer] 18 May, 2020 @ 8:34am 
@Pharaonkheops The numbers are red because your game needs more memory than what is available as RAM.
#5
Pharaonkheops 18 May, 2020 @ 8:48am 
Ok, so "virtual memory" could be defined as total Memory used by the game, be it RAM and/or PF. Am I right on this?
Correlative is that, if I was having a 32G RAM, I should not have red numbers?
#6
thale5  [developer] 18 May, 2020 @ 9:04am 
@Pharaonkheops Yes. "Total memory usage" is the best way to think about it.

With 32 GB RAM and ~20 GB usage, you would be far from red.

By the way, you might have other apps running and consuming RAM (perhaps background apps) because the game was given so little RAM at 20 GB virtual usage.

Before I start Steam, Task manager shows 14+ GB of 16 GB RAM available.
#7
Pharaonkheops 18 May, 2020 @ 9:34am 
I made my test with a freshly started Win10 15+ GB on task manager
#8
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