New memory leak or?

LMar · October 2016

Hey,
The past week or two or so I have had some nasty crashes on my older pc while playing ESO. It usually plays just fine and I have no problem with crashes or excessive lag but the last couple of weeks I have had a crash where the whole PC restarts while playing ESO. Has anyone else experienced something similar? Is it a new memory leak perhaps that is causing the game to crash after playing a while or is it simply the larger amounts of effects etc with people duelling inside cities?

Onigar · October 2016

Yes, the forums have several posts now relating to memory leak issues since Tamriel One.

Also I am daily experiencing memory leak game lockup issues and self recovery on a daily (sometimes hourly or even more often) basis.

However I have still to find some response from ZOS regarding current memory leak issues.

Chuga_Rei · October 2016

Yup same here. Newish(8 months) loaded alienware with a 1g connection. Went from silky smooth to the reliability of something made out of wood.

Nerouyn · October 2016

Onigar wrote: »

However I have still to find some response from ZOS regarding current memory leak issues.

Not everyone is playing with even remotely the same hardware. It's possible that most players, like myself, aren't experiencing this problem.

It can take time for enough bug reports to come with enough info for them to track down the cause and fix it.

drakhan2002_ESO · October 2016

I have started to receive the memory leak as well...but I only notice if I play for a long stretch of time.

nine9six · October 2016

Since One Tamriel I've had my game get very choppy if I play for longer than an hour or so. Requires a Quit / Relaunch to resolve.

Yesterday I performed my once-per-year rig rebuild and manually installed ESO and re-downloaded all of the assets (instead of restoring from a backup) but haven't played ESO to see if anything changed.

I have a feeling the issue will persist.

ZombieZig · October 2016

It will persist.

Zos is made of Suits and not Gamers.

Chuga_Rei · October 2016

Nerouyn wrote: »

Onigar wrote: »

However I have still to find some response from ZOS regarding current memory leak issues.

Not everyone is playing with even remotely the same hardware. It's possible that most players, like myself, aren't experiencing this problem.

It can take time for enough bug reports to come with enough info for them to track down the cause and fix it.

I should of done a better job explaining the "alienware" meme. It happens to be what i run but its also a little jib at ZOS

elvenmad · October 2016

Quite a few players experiencing this as well, a lot in Cyrodiil, from my own experience and I put it down to memory leak, I noticed after porting around while collecting mage books, after 3 or 4 ports my ESO memory use was up to 8 gigs which ended up in game freeze then crash.

Been a lot of reports about it mainly since Tam one patch mainly from players experiencing it after exploring or porting around, its obviously the same and they have also reported it too, but no response at all from ZoS.

I did submit a ticket a while ago and got a response, they said try running client repair, and also check your MSCONFIG settings and then restart router. LOL its not on my end, not when so many are also suffering the same issues, but thats suport for you, I dont think they know what they are doing most of the time

nine9six · October 2016

ZombieZig wrote: »

It will persist.

Zos is made of Suits and not Gamers.

Sad, but true.

Dymence · October 2016

Something I found out since One Tamriel (perhaps longer?):

If you spend a long time in a specific zone (30+ minutes) your frames per second will slowly but surely be 'consumed' by something. If you then port to another zone, and come back, you'll once again have your original frame rate.

Example: I tend to duel in the outskirts of Rawl'kha, where I start off at around 70 fps. But after a while I'll sit at 30 fps in the exact same area. Then I port somewhere else, come back, and I have 70 fps again.

As far as I can tell, the above is true for the majority of the playerbase (if not everyone?) and the above 'fix' works for them too.

d0e1ow · October 2016

I've noticed that after an hour or so of playing my FPS will go down to around 30. I can get it back up to normal by re-starting the game. It's a real pain. I don't think it happened last night while playing though.

Soafee · October 2016

I agree something is going on. I'm on a "Okay" for gaming laptop that could normally run any game as long as I had the graphics turned to low/medium with all extras turned off like shadows and grass.. lately I can't seem to find a setup combo that isn't lagging me when I get into groups and do dungeons. Some fights lag me so I bad I can't move.

nine9six · October 2016

FWIW, zoning doesn't resolve my issue. Only closing and relaunching the game does.

Syrani · October 2016

If your PC is restarting following a crash, it could be hardware related. I had a similar issue a while back on a 3 month old PC. Many times when I went into a load screen, my PC would restart. It didn't happen every time, but it happened a lot. I took it back to the place I had it built and they ran a test. They found nothing wrong and suggested I uninstall and reinstall ESO. I did that, but the restarts kept happening. I took it back in a second time and they ran a much more thorough test, and discovered my power supply was failing under load.

If there is a memory leak (and I also experience those FPS drops you mentioned), that could be stressing a piece of failing hardware out enough to cause your PC to restart.

LMar · October 2016

Oouch I hope that isn't it. I checked the event viewer and it said power kernel something something. But it only happens with ESO

Syrani · October 2016

It was the same in my case - only happened on ESO. I guess that's why they suggested I uninstall and reinstall it, but I wish they had just tested it properly the first time I took it in. My guess is that WoW (the only other game I tried during that time) was just not putting enough stress on my power supply to get it to fail.

If you have another graphics intensive game (like maybe Witcher 3, which was suggested to me for stress testing), maybe play that for a while to see if it shuts down your PC. Either way, even if it doesn't shut down while playing another game, if it keeps happening in ESO, you may need to take it in to have a stress test done to see if you have a component failing under heavy load.

ZOS_GinaBruno · October 2016

When you guys are crashing, is it crashing all the way to your desktop, or are you just getting disconnected and put back to the login screen? Are you receiving any specific error message?

LMar · October 2016

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

When you guys are crashing, is it crashing all the way to your desktop, or are you just getting disconnected and put back to the login screen? Are you receiving any specific error message?

Sometimes it just freezes and nothing happens until I press a few buttons which then give a windows message saying "Program has stopped responding. Wait for it to respond or end? " or something close to that. Other times it actually just makes my whole PC freeze, crash and restart without any warning or error.

elvenmad · October 2016

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

When you guys are crashing, is it crashing all the way to your desktop, or are you just getting disconnected and put back to the login screen? Are you receiving any specific error message?

no message, no windows error logs, game crashes to login screen, no system issues at all, game just closes and from my experience it happens mostly if you port around alot and change zones, does this alot in Cyrodiil, and if you try to log back the same character you get a never ending load screen and have to close the game via Task Manager.

noticed while in Cyrodiil and having resource manager running in the background seen my ESO memory usage go up to and past 8 gigs, the more you port from keep to keep the higher it goes.

This started after One Tam patch

drakhan2002_ESO · October 2016

LMar wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

When you guys are crashing, is it crashing all the way to your desktop, or are you just getting disconnected and put back to the login screen? Are you receiving any specific error message?

Sometimes it just freezes and nothing happens until I press a few buttons which then give a windows message saying "Program has stopped responding. Wait for it to respond or end? " or something close to that. Other times it actually just makes my whole PC freeze, crash and restart without any warning or error.

Twice I've gotten the "what where you doing?" pop-up window when the game crashed (since One Tamriel)...all the rest of the times it occurs when I log out...the screen will go black...hang for 10 seconds and then I'll get a Windows pop up that indicates "This application has stopped responding".

Ilsabet · October 2016

For about the last week (maybe two, I forget exactly which patch it was) I've been getting consistent "LUA reaching limit" messages after logging into characters. I set my LUA limit to 512 long ago, which took care of those popups until they started back up again after this recent patch. Yesterday I tried increasing the LUA limit to 1024, and that stopped the popups, but I also started having major lag and crashing issues. I still don't know if this is add-on related, but I'm suspecting not (especially after reading about other people having the same problem). After the first couple of crashes I set the LUA limit back to 512, hoping that this would throttle the massive memory usage I was seeing in my task manager. Even after I disabled most of my add-ons for the character I was playing on most of the day, ESO was using way more memory than usual and kept crashing.

Sometimes the game would lag out and then crash to the login screen, but several times the screen just went black and none of my button-mashing did anything. I learned the first time that this happened (a while back) that the only way to recover is to ctrl-alt-delete and open the task manager, at which point I'm able to see the "yeah sorry it stopped working, please tell us what you were doing and send an error report" box. Then I can close the program and restart it.

I played pretty much the whole day yesterday (spamming dolmens to level a new character) and crashed maybe 12-15 times over the course of the day. Most times the game would lag out before it crashed, and everything would freeze or I wouldn't be able to interact with things or use skills.

I don't believe I ever got the Windows system message about the program stopping. It's either crash to login screen or black screen + "what were you doing" box.

Rune_Relic · October 2016

Dymence wrote: »

Something I found out since One Tamriel (perhaps longer?):

If you spend a long time in a specific zone (30+ minutes) your frames per second will slowly but surely be 'consumed' by something. If you then port to another zone, and come back, you'll once again have your original frame rate.

Example: I tend to duel in the outskirts of Rawl'kha, where I start off at around 70 fps. But after a while I'll sit at 30 fps in the exact same area. Then I port somewhere else, come back, and I have 70 fps again.

As far as I can tell, the above is true for the majority of the playerbase (if not everyone?) and the above 'fix' works for them too.

d0e1ow wrote: »

I've noticed that after an hour or so of playing my FPS will go down to around 30. I can get it back up to normal by re-starting the game. It's a real pain. I don't think it happened last night while playing though.

Next time just try /reloadui
..see if that brings performance back up.

There was an old back that wasnt clearing a cache somewhere.
Clearing the UI was a temporary fix.
Using AoE dramatically sped up the loss in FPS.
Using single target delayed the loss in FPS.

With that bug I could also drop down the particle effect limit to 0 and that would also fix the issue.
I will investigate later.

Cronopoly · October 2016

I've been hitting Submit to the crash report, so hopefully someone is reading some of them... Typically every two hours. I'll pop out and see if memory useage is up.

BRogueNZ · October 2016

Not sure if its related but there are times in cyrodill (rarely play anywhere else) when I'm locked in a never ending load screen and memory use soars. The only solution I've found is to force quit and log into an alt then back to main.

Also eso64.exe does not die when you 'Quit' the game, it rarely closes (just sits on a black screen for a month of Sundays) without me having to kill it.

NobleNerd · October 2016

elvenmad wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

When you guys are crashing, is it crashing all the way to your desktop, or are you just getting disconnected and put back to the login screen? Are you receiving any specific error message?

no message, no windows error logs, game crashes to login screen, no system issues at all, game just closes and from my experience it happens mostly if you port around alot and change zones, does this alot in Cyrodiil, and if you try to log back the same character you get a never ending load screen and have to close the game via Task Manager.

noticed while in Cyrodiil and having resource manager running in the background seen my ESO memory usage go up to and past 8 gigs, the more you port from keep to keep the higher it goes.

This started after One Tam patch

Unfortunately this is nothing new to the game. Back when I played it often this same thing was happening well before the One Tamriel. I think it is something deep in the coding that like to rear up now and again.

ZOS_GinaBruno · October 2016

Thanks for the extra info! We're taking a look and will let you know if have any other questions to help.

Dymence · October 2016

Rune_Relic wrote: »

Dymence wrote: »

Something I found out since One Tamriel (perhaps longer?):

If you spend a long time in a specific zone (30+ minutes) your frames per second will slowly but surely be 'consumed' by something. If you then port to another zone, and come back, you'll once again have your original frame rate.

Example: I tend to duel in the outskirts of Rawl'kha, where I start off at around 70 fps. But after a while I'll sit at 30 fps in the exact same area. Then I port somewhere else, come back, and I have 70 fps again.

As far as I can tell, the above is true for the majority of the playerbase (if not everyone?) and the above 'fix' works for them too.

d0e1ow wrote: »

I've noticed that after an hour or so of playing my FPS will go down to around 30. I can get it back up to normal by re-starting the game. It's a real pain. I don't think it happened last night while playing though.

Next time just try /reloadui
..see if that brings performance back up.

There was an old back that wasnt clearing a cache somewhere.
Clearing the UI was a temporary fix.
Using AoE dramatically sped up the loss in FPS.
Using single target delayed the loss in FPS.

With that bug I could also drop down the particle effect limit to 0 and that would also fix the issue.
I will investigate later.

I've tried that, doesn't work. Only changing zone works.

MaxwellC · October 2016

@ZOS_GinaBruno
This also happens on console (XB1 NA server), I would sometimes have a huge stutter then it'll crash to the dashboard. It's been a lot more frequent as of late (started more when one tamriel dropped).

captainwolfos · October 2016

Mine started getting the dizzying heights of about three frames per second, the Sunday night after the Witches Festival officially started. Before then, it was perfectly fine.

To combat this, I've had to bite the bullet and set my graphical settings to minimum, for between 19-29 frames per second.

I've also noticed that I can't close the game down properly by using "quit" in the menus, or on the main login screen. If I do, it'll just hang, and if I click it, then it'll come up with a Windows error: "the game is not responding, close or wait?" I have to ALT+F4 in order to shut it down.

PC, both NA and EU servers.

Own · October 2016

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

When you guys are crashing, is it crashing all the way to your desktop, or are you just getting disconnected and put back to the login screen? Are you receiving any specific error message?

I start having choppy frames and gameplay with high fps/good latency. I have to reload ui and it fixes it. It's time based. The more combat im in, the sooner I have to reload ui.