Higher Than Usual CPU Usage

[fabelmik.3052]

> @"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:

> How are you measuring this? Are you including disk cache, or is this strictly the GW2 client size?

 

The measuring method I used is very simple:

1. I open Task Manager and click on Performance tab to monitor the Memory usage.

2. I make sure I don´t have any programs running.

3. I then look at the data in Task Manager and take notes.

4. Now I open the GW2 game client.

5. I then again look at the data in Task Manager and take notes.

etc...

 

I should mention that I´m fortunate enough to have a dual monitor setup where I have the desktop on monitor 1 and the game on monitor 2.

That way I can monitor the Task Manager while I play the game.

 

 

 

[SlippyCheeze.5483]

> @"fabelmik.3052" said:

> > @"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:

> > How are you measuring this? Are you including disk cache, or is this strictly the GW2 client size?

>

> The measuring method I used is very simple:

> 1. I open Task Manager and click on Performance tab to monitor the Memory usage.

 

That's the "In Use (Compressed)" value, then? I'm assuming compressed was zero? Thanks for explaining. That explains the differences in our measurements, as I was looking specifically at memory used by the gw2 process, not overall system memory consumption.

[fabelmik.3052]

> @"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:

> That's the "In Use (Compressed)" value, then?

 

What I look at in Task Manager > Performance tab is simply the measurement of overall memory usage.

"In use" / "Total"

 

In Task Manager > Performance tab you´ll see the left side overview with statistics of CPU, Memory, Disk, Ethernet etc...

Look at this image that shows exactly what information I´m reading from: 

 

 

[SlippyCheeze.5483]

> @"fabelmik.3052" said:

> > @"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:

> > That's the "In Use (Compressed)" value, then?

>

> What I look at in Task Manager > Performance tab is simply the measurement of overall memory usage.

> "In use" / "Total"

>

> In Task Manager > Performance tab you´ll see the left side overview with statistics of CPU, Memory, Disk, Ethernet etc...

> Look at this image that shows exactly what information I´m reading from: 

 

Yah, what I'm referencing is on the right pane, bottom left side, saying "(11.3MB)" of memory is compressed rather than swapped in this instance. That shows the same value as the graph on the left, though, so all is good. :)

[fabelmik.3052]

Today I monitered the mem usage while in Lion´s Arch at Eastern Ward with alot of players trafficking around, and at peak GW2 used up around 4.2GB of RAM.

This resulted in total system mem usage hitting the +90% mark, and when that happened it seems Windows kicked into semi panic mode and started buffering to disk, which also resulted in more CPU load and I could feel the in-game framerate dropping significantly.

 

It seems to me that when RAM usage reaches around 90% Windows 10 / GW2 goes to plan-b for allocating data to the system.

These are just my observations.

 

I guess one could make a more technical test setup to verify/de-varify my observations.

It would be interesting to hear what a GW2 developer has to say about this matter.

 

[SlippyCheeze.5483]

> @"fabelmik.3052" said:

> Today I monitered the mem usage while in Lion´s Arch at Eastern Ward with alot of players trafficking around, and at peak GW2 used up around 4.2GB of RAM.

> This resulted in total system mem usage hitting the +90% mark, and when that happened it seems Windows kicked into semi panic mode and started buffering to disk, which also resulted in more CPU load and I could feel the in-game framerate dropping significantly.

 

Hrm. It shouldn't be that significant a CPU cost, even extensively using compressed in-memory swap. It might be interesting, if you can, to see the paging rate (eg: how much is memory is being written to and read from disk during this time.)

 

> It seems to me that when RAM usage reaches around 90% Windows 10 / GW2 goes to plan-b for allocating data to the system.

> These are just my observations.

 

That is certainly the level that performance is likely to drop, due to having to hit disk for almost every access to textures, models, etc, in GW2 -- not enough spare memory to keep it in the disk cache.

 

> I guess one could make a more technical test setup to verify/de-varify my observations.

> It would be interesting to hear what a GW2 developer has to say about this matter.

 

I doubt they have anything especially significant to say about it. The game consumes a reasonable amount of memory for what it does, and the rest of it isn't GW2 specific behaviour - any game (or application of any sort) will provoke the same responses from Windows using the same memory the same general way.

[fabelmik.3052]

> @"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:

> I doubt they have anything especially significant to say about it. The game consumes a reasonable amount of memory for what it does, and the rest of it isn't GW2 specific behaviour - any game (or application of any sort) will provoke the same responses from Windows using the same memory the same general way.

 

I would imagine that it´s actually very much dependent on how the game is programmed how it utilizes the operating system´s framework, in this case Windows 10 64-bit.

If a 64 bit Windows application is poorly written that could result in unwanted behavior, such as memory leaks etc.

A Windows programmer / game developer would of course know, better than any of us, what the general consequences are for client memory running low and at what point low memory becomes a performance issue, in general.

 

Specifically for GW2 there probably is a specific part of the code for managing memory when RAM resources are low, that is not 100% identical to what´s found in other games, so having a GW2 developer talk to us, in regards to Guild Wars 2 and memory issues, would be awesome, no?

 

If any game developer wanted to give us some insights on this topic that would be nice, but hearing from a GW2 developer would be even greater, I think.