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Unread 12-19-2012, 09:41 AM
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magill magill is offline
The Undying
 
Join Date: Sep 2010
Location: Philadelphia PA
Posts: 85
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bilton
"All of that said, now the "gochas."
The Mac Client, like the Windows Client, still suffers from Memory Leak(s). These manifest themselves "quickly" in Rohan, Instances, and Session Plays. In most of Middle Earth other than Rohan, it can take a couple of hours for the Mac Client to Freeze. At which time, the client will show as "Client not responding" to "Force Quit."

Get a memory cleaner app. My wife and I use Clean Memory which has a menubar icon which shows how much free memory is available. It is free on the Mac App Store. She plays WoW. I used to but have started playing LOTRO. We are both long time corporate & individual programmers. When we see memory running low while playing, we click the menubar icon and then click the Clean Memory button. You don't have to exit the game just find a quiet safe area to wait while it does its work. It usually restores over a gig or more of memory. We now almost never have to reboot our Macs. If you don't like this one, try another one. There are many available.

These programs work by seeking out "inactive" memory and returning it to the free memory pool. In games like LOTRO and WoW these are all those little bits of graphics just sitting idle from some area you long ago left and may never return.

ONE CAVEAT: Don't try to clean memory twice in a row thinking you will squeeze out some more lost bits. It may "over clean". If you don't get the desired results, exit the game and then clean again to recover the leaked memory.
I'm now retired after 30+ years as a Unix System Administrator at a major Ivy League University with a major Computer Science department. The user community has a radical lack of knowledge about "Memory Management" in today's modern operating systems (yes, including all versions of Windows) and Memory Management within a program itself. The difference is, if you will, between Systems Programming and Application Programming. While Systems Programmers can make good Application Programmers; an Application Programmer is totally lost when confronted with System Programming situations. I've interviewed them both; and it can take several years before a GOOD Applications Programmer becomes a "competent" Systems programmer. They may both write "C" code, but the technologies, theories, and techniques used are completely different.

Memory cleaners are a con-job. The "Free memory" is the same number you can get directly from Apple's Activity Monitor in Utilities. It refers to Physical RAM not being used by the OS or allocated to individual programs. Their primary purpose is to convince you to buy more physical RAM -- but if you already have 8GB that accomplishes nothing but to put dollars in someone else's pocket.

Memory Cleaners simply don't work the way in which people think they work. Nor do they have any impact on the particulars of any specific program. All they do is "speed up" the OS's normal memory deallocation process. While this may be useful when you are" running" say 8 programs simultaneously, 7 of which are sitting there in the background doing nothing but taking up memory, they do nothing for the 8th and the active program.

The memory leak in LOTRO (in both the Mac Client and the Windows Client) has to do with the simple fact that the LOTRO PROGRAM is a 32 bit program which is trying to address more than about 3.7GB of memory. (A 32bit program can only address a maximum of 4GB, period. It's a mathematical limitation.) It doesn't matter if the Client is running on a 32bit OS like XP or a 64bit OS like OSX. Nor does it matter if the client is running on a Mac with 4GB of memory or 8GB of memory.

I don't run Windows, but with the LOTRO Mac Client, neither the Client nor OSX normally "crash" because of the "Memory Leak." Rather, the Client "freezes" because it is attempting to address more than it's allocated 4GB of memory and the OS is preventing it. At this point OSX keeps hammering at the Client until it finally quits. It takes 20-60 minutes, but the LOTRO Client will finally terminate leaving OSX still running unphased. Because it takes so long, most people opt for the "fast way out" and reboot.
But when you look at the "Crash dump" induced at termination, you discover that lo and behold, the Client is attempting to address beyond 3.7GB (the max for a 32 bit program under OSX.) The specific cause is always the same -- a page fault (address exception.)

The other thing which will recover unused memory -- quit all of those other programs you have running in the background -- OSX has enough such threads of its own.

BTW "Clean Memory" is $.99 in the App Store, not free. "Memory Clean" is a free one.
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Bill Magill Mac Player
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