WoW Snow Leopard memory leak???

[TheAnswer]

Just curious if anyone else has noticed WoW using a larger portion of memory under Snow Leopard?

I noticed that after about an hour, WoW takes up most all of my available memory and the hard drive activity starts up as virtual memory starts being utilized more often (probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise, but it's affecting my fps )

My machine is only about a year old (iMac 2.8 Intel Core 2 Duo), but it's only got 2 GB of RAM. Seemed to run WoW fine under 10.5, so I'm not sure if this is a bug or just a great excuse to go get more RAM.

Also, could it be an addon sapping the memory? I don't use many (Carbonite, DBM, Recount, Omen, Altoholic and a couple others).

Any insights would be gratefully appreciated.

 

[BentwoodBlue]

I have not noticed any memory issues with WoW and SL. If anything after I play for extended periods I notice better performance. Maybe an addon is the culprit, but I'm not sure how.

 

[Dragonforce]

Well, after an hour or so of WoW its process alone eats like 3 GB RAM on my 6 GB machine... so if you have only 2 GB installed... go figure.

(but it was like that already before SL)

 

[apfhex]

Also, could it be an addon sapping the memory? I don't use many (Carbonite, DBM, Recount, Omen, Altoholic and a couple others).

WoW uses a lot of memory, more the longer you've played, and some addons can use a lot too. Recount definitely can depending on your settings.

 

[magbarn]

I've gotten the same memory leak on WoW, is it better to just make a bootcamp partition and run Wow in win7 instead?

 

[Dragonforce]

There is no memory leak -_-

 

[Hydra]

I had severe swapping in WoW sometimes when I bought my MacBook in late 2008 as it had 2GB of RAM (GPU eats 256MB of it). Fixed it by installing 4GB.

But don't get that swapping on my iMac with 2GB of RAM as it has 256MB of dedicated VRAM in it. Not in Leopard nor in Snow leopard now.

 

[TheAnswer]

I had severe swapping in WoW sometimes when I bought my MacBook in late 2008 as it had 2GB of RAM (GPU eats 256MB of it). Fixed it by installing 4GB.

But don't get that swapping on my iMac with 2GB of RAM as it has 256MB of dedicated VRAM in it. Not in Leopard nor in Snow leopard now.

Yeah, in Leopard I never noticed any swapping. I could run WoW, getting 60 fps (I capped it there to keep down the heat), watch Hulu in a small pop-up in the corner and keep Safari and Mail open.

Unfortunately, since Snow Leopard the swapping will start after about an hour even if I only have WoW open.

WoW uses a lot of memory, more the longer you've played, and some addons can use a lot too. Recount definitely can depending on your settings.

I'm not using Recount's over-time data (the one that states on the tooltip that it's a resource hog).

I tried a Snow Leopard reinstall but with no change.

Could this be a corrupted WoW database/cache issue? I'd reinstall WoW from scratch, but I really don't want to spend a day setting up my addons on all my toons again. On the other hand, I don't want to upgrade to 4GB RAM and then watch it slowly eat up all 4GB in the activity monitor.

Thanks for all the input.

 

[Stiss]

I have 4GB Ram on my 2.4ghz Alubook.

WoW is fine. There is no memory leak. I've not noticed a difference, i can still play wow while chatting to friends on skype and browsing the net. Not all at the same time of course cause i don't have enough hands

 

[ezekielrage_99]

I've noticed that with WC3... I thought I may have been because I was running stuff in the background

 

[whooleytoo]

Have you checked the memory usage in Activity Monitor? If there is a memory leak, it should be very apparent in that window.

Could also be an issue with how much VRAM you have - particularly since SL uses the GPU even more?

 

[TheAnswer]

Have you checked the memory usage in Activity Monitor? If there is a memory leak, it should be very apparent in that window.

Could also be an issue with how much VRAM you have - particularly since SL uses the GPU even more?

I have a dedicated video card with 256 VRAM, so that's not part of the problem.

I bought the bullet and purchased an additional 2GB, so I've got 4GB total (so the swapping issue has gone away). But I still suspect something is not right here. I used to be able to do so much more under Leopard and still play WoW without it running out of memory.

Now with the RAM upgrade it doesn't run out, but below is what Activity Monitor looks like after a couple of hours of play.

 

[whooleytoo]

1.4GB is quite a bit, but I don't have WoW so I don't know how much it normally takes. You need to compare that figure with the memory usage just after you start playing.

If there's a slight difference, it's to be expected; but if it has grown a lot and isn't going back down, there's a memory leak alright.

p.s. If you only had 2GB initially, it's easy to see now why performance was struggling dramatically.

 

[lorenwade]

I bought a 20" Alumininum 2.4ghz iMac with 1gb of ram. I ran WoW on it fine for a long time. It now has 4gb of ram (a $50 upgrade), and runs even smoother. I have not changed the video settings on WoW either. It runs everything on low except view distance, which is maxed.

No problems here.

 

[TheAnswer]

1.4GB is quite a bit, but I don't have WoW so I don't know how much it normally takes. You need to compare that figure with the memory usage just after you start playing.

If there's a slight difference, it's to be expected; but if it has grown a lot and isn't going back down, there's a memory leak alright.

p.s. If you only had 2GB initially, it's easy to see now why performance was struggling dramatically.

Yeah, it's not hard to tell that over half of the 2GB is taken up by the OS and WoW, so obviously with just 2GB RAM the performance problems were obvious. As stated above, under Leopard I was running WoW with no performance issues (and no swapping) and running Safari, watching Hulu, Mail simultaneously. It's the drastic change since SL that leads me to believe there's an issue. I guess I'm suspecting a difference in how Snow Leopard manages RAM that Blizzard or an addon author hasn't adjusted for yet or something similar.

Here's the activity monitor after roughly 15 minutes of play:

 

[sparkn]

So far, no one has shown my problem. Mass lag has been such a problem in Snow Leopard that I've reinstalled Leopard. One interesting note I see from the Activity Monitor, though. You're showing 24 threads open in WoW. I was showing 780-850 threads open (flipping HUGE). I'm now showing only 22 threads open again with Leopard and all my problems have gone away. Memory leak? Addon crash? IDK. I was getting that with all addons turned off.

 

[brbubba]

So far, no one has shown my problem. Mass lag has been such a problem in Snow Leopard that I've reinstalled Leopard. One interesting note I see from the Activity Monitor, though. You're showing 24 threads open in WoW. I was showing 780-850 threads open (flipping HUGE). I'm now showing only 22 threads open again with Leopard and all my problems have gone away. Memory leak? Addon crash? IDK. I was getting that with all addons turned off.

I have had a memory leak, not with WoW (Sorry I don't play), but with Skype or Safari. I can't Pinpoint which of the two is the culprit, but I am leaning towards Skype. This memory leak never happened prior to the upgrade, so I don't know what's going on.

 

[SolidSnake90]

I only have 1GB of RAM (2006 Macbook) WoW ran fine up until about a month or 2 ago. It shuts off my Airport and sends my latency through the roof. Any suggestions to fixing it?

 

[TEphraim]

I had the same problem after updating to SL. Any news about this?

I even bought 2 GB more RAM, so I have now 4 GB RAM in my MBook Pro.
Now it just takes longer until I have only 10 MB left of free RAM but the problem still exists ....

Ciao Ephraim