7dtd takes about 16g to 32g RAM!!! Plz fix it

[S3xySteak]

Version A20.6 stable

My pc has 16g RAM

The save is from my 14 days of survival play, the map is the default 8K map

When I set the Virtual Memory 1g to 8g .This game crushes when it was loading my save. I tried again and my pc shut down :(

When I set the virtual memory 1g to 16g. I can play this game without errors

So this game takes about 16G to 32G RAM!!! That is so crazy!!

 

The exact number is about 22g(16g RAM + 6g Virtual Memory). But I only play 14days single-player in this save.

Using virtual memory won't lead to errors. But it will make your FPS lower. Because virtual memory is much more slower than RAM. The best PCIe4.0 SSD is much more slower than the worst DDR4 RAM.

If your game's FPS is not very low but it looks lag, or you can play 7dtd smoothly but it becomes lag after days in game, you may need 32gb RAM

Image here

[Jugginator]

I will say that using a custom page file (virtual memory) is a bad idea in any modern Windows OS, since Windows 7 I believe, especially with Unity games. It causes all sorts of issues, leave it on automatic and it will do its job if you need more.

[Fox]

Interesting that you say this game alone eats up 16GB of your total 16GB of ram when your OS and background apps need ram (and pagefile) too.

 

Ram is nothing to upgrade and are priced decently too (DDR5 is overpriced, but that's just because most of us aren't dumb enough to buy it right now given their lack of performance gain). Also, I don't entirely believe that Pagefile is necessary for you to run the game without crashing with only 16GB of ram as I used to play this game with Pagefile completely disabled while having only 16GB of ram a few years ago and I never once received a crash. Granted, it was a different version of the game, but there's no way the game changed that much over 2-ish years. Something tells me you have crap running in the background eating up a lot of ram for nothing.

 

Also, I just conducted a quick 1/2 hour test and with this latest version of the game (and on a 10k map and I walked through the entire large city area, on max graphics settings), my ram usage went from 3.4GB (Win10 and background apps with game closed) to 11.5GB usage out of 32GB of available ram. Obviously more ram might get used the more you play, but that's likely extra which "shouldn't" hinder performance at all if it ended up in pagefile. So realistically, this game requires a minimum of 8GB of ram to launch the game (OS and background apps not included in estimation) and can continue using more ram the longer you play, but is likely not required. Besides, what else is pagefile for if not to accommodate those who can't afford more ram? If the pagefile is on a decent SSD, then I doubt there'd be any performance impact at all anyway in my opinion.

 

So in my opinion, 16GB of ram is still plenty to run this game for several hours a day (so long as you're not hosting other players as that obviously requires more ram). 32GB of ram is optional but recommended for the latest games being released.

Edited October 24, 2022 by Fox (see edit history)

[Whiteshark68]

The problem with 7 days is that it puts around the same amount of memory it uses to run into standby which is not restricted to 7d2d a lot of games do the same thing.

just finished launching the game and even though task manager says that 7 days is using just over 14gigs out of 32  if you go into the performance tab you can see it using 25 gigs of ram right at this moment i have 35 mb of ram free out of 32 gigs and if you happen to close the game that memory that 7 days has locked into standby isn't released until you either restart your computer or run a program called rammap64 which has the ability to empty the standby list.

[Fox]

1 hour ago, Whiteshark68 said:

The problem with 7 days is that it puts around the same amount of memory it uses to run into standby which is not restricted to 7d2d a lot of games do the same thing.

just finished launching the game and even though task manager says that 7 days is using just over 14gigs out of 32  if you go into the performance tab you can see it using 25 gigs of ram right at this moment i have 35 mb of ram free out of 32 gigs and if you happen to close the game that memory that 7 days has locked into standby isn't released until you either restart your computer or run a program called rammap64 which has the ability to empty the standby list.

That sounds like something else is going on because I don't see that at all at my end and doesn't sound at all like something a game would do unless the game refuses to close correctly (unresponsive). My guess is that either you have an antivirus using that memory (scanning while playing, which is typical junk AV behavior) or a third party app that interacts with the game either with fps counter or screen capture or something along those lines. Also, the game using up 14GB of ram at launch sounds insane to me, unless you have a buttload of heavy mods installed (which would not be the game's fault at all).

[Whiteshark68]

No because if i do not have 7d2d running my memory usage is around 4 to 5 gigs but since i had it running when i posted i still have 16 gigs of memory in standby so when i close 7d2d it frees up the memory it was "using" but keeps the whatever it decides to put in standby in standby and it is not available to be used and if you only have 16gigs of memory that adds up to issues but it is not a specific 7d2d problem a few games do the same thing.

To be honest i had the same type of response from a lot of people when i was having issues with ARK because it didn't happen to them it didn't happen at all and i was full of BS.

Just because you do not see any issue doesn't mean it hasn't happened i never have an issue with memory running 7d2d but that is because i run 32gigs of ram

also i guarantee that your system will still have however much ram 7d2d has put into standby still there after you shut the game down.

[Jugginator]

I can safely say if you launch 7 days and it immediately starts using 14gb of ram, there's something wrong. Mine only uses 1.1 GB working set and 2.9GB commit on launch.

 

If you mean after generating a new RWG, close and restart the game after generating a new world.

47 minutes ago, Whiteshark68 said:

also i guarantee that your system will still have however much ram 7d2d has put into standby still there after you shut the game down.

 

So, standby memory you're seeing is memory that programs frequently/recently use, it is not memory taken up and that cache is instantly overwritten if it's needed. That's completely normal, and is different from a "memory leak", and is actually Windows doing that to make your frequently used programs snappier/load faster.

 

Case in point, I had 21GB in my Standby. Loaded 7 days into a world, it ate up the Standby, exited the game, I am now at 15GB. 

[FinkPloyd]

2 hours ago, Whiteshark68 said:

 i still have 16 gigs of memory in standby so when i close 7d2d it frees up the memory it was "using" but keeps the whatever it decides to put in standby in standby

 

Standby memory being retained after the application is closed is by design.

 

Standby memory is not RAM.

Standby memory is a copy of the RAM used by the last application you closed (sort of...).

 

 

2 hours ago, Whiteshark68 said:

To be honest i had the same type of response from a lot of people when i was having issues with ARK because it didn't happen to them it didn't happen at all

 

If you have memory issues with multiple applications it may point to a PC issue (XMP, timings, slots used, hardware faults, etc)

 

I recently had to update a motherboard BIOS because XMP was not stable with 4 RAM sticks (4 sticks were fine without XMP or with 2 sticks + XMP)

 

[Whiteshark68]

 i think the OP's point here is that yes 16gigs of ram is more than is required to run 7d2d according to the recommended specs but in the real world it may not be.

just as a case point my 7d2d actually uses 1.1 GB working set and 2.9GB commit on launch in vanilla.

But i haven't played vanilla for about 3 months or so my example was actually for undead legacy

 

I never said i was having issues with memory i was just supporting what the OP was saying because yes 7d2d is a memory hog when it wants to be and i do know that the standby memory is windows keeping recently used files loaded so it easier/quicker to load those programs next time.

all i was saying was that 7d2d isn't the only game that retains 10 to 15 gigs of memory in standby and btw that program i mentioned was recommended by microsoft to empty the standby list so it can free up memory because people were having issues with running out of memory and the only issue they were having was large chunks of memory taken up in the standby set and microsoft was aware of the "problem" which may have be fixed.

You keep making my point about the annoying posters when it was revealed by the developers that ARK was having an issue but only for people with AMD systems because they were not having any sort of issue because they were running intel systems and that was 2 systems ago for me

Edited October 25, 2022 by Whiteshark68
added some information and removed a perceived inflamatory wording (see edit history)

[Naz]

My 2 cents, haven't noticed 7dtd using an asinine amount  of ram during normal gameplay. However i have noticed it doesn't clear junk data it doesn't need anymore when loading into a world, then quitting and either loading the same or another world. So if you load>quit to menu load>menu>load> menu etc it eats more and more ram until the game grinds to a hault and it can't even switch block model lods and performance tanks. Generally i always fully quit the game and restart it rather than quit to the menu and back into the save again. 

Can be a real pain for modders since testing mods you're forever quitting and reloading.

[Riamus]

I never had an issue with RAM usage except with reloading without fully exiting the game or from prolonged play.  What I did have issues with on an HDD install was 100% hard drive usage on start, causing it to not respond.  After moving it to SDD, that dropped to 50% and loaded almost 3x faster.  I also have frequent freezing around every 20 minutes due to the game unloading unused data every 20 minutes.  If the save game is on SSD, it will only freeze for up to 10 seconds. If it is saved on HDD, it can freeze for 3-5 minutes, which is quite annoying.  But nothing with RAM for normal play on an AMD CPU and Radeon graphics card on a 4 year old computer.  That doesn't mean that a specific computer setup or set of software installed can't cause such a problem. Just giving my experience in case it helps any.

[Fox]

27 minutes ago, Riamus said:

I never had an issue with RAM usage except with reloading without fully exiting the game or from prolonged play.  What I did have issues with on an HDD install was 100% hard drive usage on start, causing it to not respond.  After moving it to SDD, that dropped to 50% and loaded almost 3x faster.  I also have frequent freezing around every 20 minutes due to the game unloading unused data every 20 minutes.  If the save game is on SSD, it will only freeze for up to 10 seconds. If it is saved on HDD, it can freeze for 3-5 minutes, which is quite annoying.  But nothing with RAM for normal play on an AMD CPU and Radeon graphics card on a 4 year old computer.  That doesn't mean that a specific computer setup or set of software installed can't cause such a problem. Just giving my experience in case it helps any.

Ya, I do think the devs should mark the game as requiring (or at least recommending) an SSD to run this game as otherwise it takes a ridiculous amount of time to load a map for the first time (re-loading maps still takes a long time but I imagine it's at least bearable for some players). I remember someone saying that it took them over 2 hours to load the map for the first time (previous game version though, so maybe that's changed since then). But that, to me, is just not acceptable and not good for a first time impression. At least if it was in the requirements, then no one could actually complain about it.

Edited October 26, 2022 by Fox (see edit history)

[FinkPloyd]

16 hours ago, Whiteshark68 said:

 that program i mentioned was recommended by microsoft to empty the standby list so it can free up memory because people were having issues with running out of memory and the only issue they were having was large chunks of memory taken up in the standby set and microsoft was aware of the "problem" which may have be fixed

 

 

RAMMap can be used as a workaround if your PC has issues with Shared Memory (and is another great app from Mark Russinovich)

 

The failure to release Shared Memory is not a 'problem' with MS OSs, it is a local PC issue (ie malware / other apps holding a reference to some files in Shared Memory, thus preventing the MS garbage collection system releasing the shared memory as required / expected)

 

 

16 hours ago, Whiteshark68 said:

You keep making my point about the annoying posters

 

No problem, I now know not to annoy you in the future...

 

[Maharin]

On 10/24/2022 at 7:39 PM, Fox said:

Interesting that you say this game alone eats up 16GB of your total 16GB of ram when your OS and background apps need ram (and pagefile) too.

 

Ram is nothing to upgrade and are priced decently too (DDR5 is overpriced, but that's just because most of us aren't dumb enough to buy it right now given their lack of performance gain). Also, I don't entirely believe that Pagefile is necessary for you to run the game without crashing with only 16GB of ram as I used to play this game with Pagefile completely disabled while having only 16GB of ram a few years ago and I never once received a crash. Granted, it was a different version of the game, but there's no way the game changed that much over 2-ish years. Something tells me you have crap running in the background eating up a lot of ram for nothing.

 

Also, I just conducted a quick 1/2 hour test and with this latest version of the game (and on a 10k map and I walked through the entire large city area, on max graphics settings), my ram usage went from 3.4GB (Win10 and background apps with game closed) to 11.5GB usage out of 32GB of available ram. Obviously more ram might get used the more you play, but that's likely extra which "shouldn't" hinder performance at all if it ended up in pagefile. So realistically, this game requires a minimum of 8GB of ram to launch the game (OS and background apps not included in estimation) and can continue using more ram the longer you play, but is likely not required. Besides, what else is pagefile for if not to accommodate those who can't afford more ram? If the pagefile is on a decent SSD, then I doubt there'd be any performance impact at all anyway in my opinion.

 

So in my opinion, 16GB of ram is still plenty to run this game for several hours a day (so long as you're not hosting other players as that obviously requires more ram). 32GB of ram is optional but recommended for the latest games being released.

 

I'm running it on a Linux laptop that maxes out at 16GB of RAM.  I had to increase my virtual memory to 16GB before I could generate anything larger than a 4K map and even at that it was problematic.  The game plays just fine, though.

 

But, yeah, I agree with the OP that requiring that much RAM is an issue, especially if they want this thing to go mainstream.  They will need to optimize memory usage somehow before it gets released.

[Riamus]

As a note, I play this on a computer with 8GB RAM.  Works fine other than the issues I mentioned above that are not constant and may or may not be related to RAM.  I wouldn't really recommend it on 8GB a more RAM would certainly help, but it does work.  Takes about 9-11 minutes to generate an 8k map.

[Maharin]

4 hours ago, Riamus said:

Takes about 9-11 minutes to generate an 8k map.

 

That most certainly is because of your lack of RAM.

[ElCabong]

Didn't mention what version of Windows you're running. You could have a static swap file and all you need to do is make it bigger. The more recent versions of windows has a dynamic swap file that gets bigger or smaller depending upon the load. 

[Whiteshark68]

On 10/28/2022 at 7:24 AM, Maharin said:

 

That most certainly is because of your lack of RAM.

No it takes me between 9 and 17 minutes to fully load most 8k RWG maps and as i have said i use 32gigs of ram and by that i mean fully loaded which includes the full map preview.

[theFlu]

11 minutes ago, Whiteshark68 said:

to fully load most 8k RWG maps

This thread seems to be using "load" interchangeably as "read from disk" and "generate", it's rather confusing.

 

Generating a new map takes ages (10+ minutes), sort of by design. (New game)

Loading a local map from disk shouldn't take all that long (still a minute or two). (Continue game, either local or remote)

Downloading a remote map will take some time, also depending on the connection afaik. (Join a new p2p / server)

[Riamus]

12 hours ago, theFlu said:

This thread seems to be using "load" interchangeably as "read from disk" and "generate", it's rather confusing.

 

Generating a new map takes ages (10+ minutes), sort of by design. (New game)

Loading a local map from disk shouldn't take all that long (still a minute or two). (Continue game, either local or remote)

Downloading a remote map will take some time, also depending on the connection afaik. (Join a new p2p / server)

Right. My comment on about 10 minutes to create a map is using the RWG generator to build a new map.  Loading a game on HDD did take about 10 minutes, but on SSD, takes me about 3-4 (with only 8GB RAM).

[Whiteshark68]

That was exactly my point it was generating a new world not loading it usually takes me about 4 to 6 minutes to generate the world then a further 10+ min to "load" that map into the previewer.

If i am just loading a save that usually takes between depending on what i am playing and whether or not it is first launch 4 and 10 minutes but also i run 7dtd from a 4 Tb HDD as i wasn't going to replace my new HDD's (i have 4 of them) with SSD's especially not at a cost of between $400  to $700 each.

[ElCabong]

I'm running 7 Days now on  my 32G windows 10 machine. I'm using an NVIDIA 970. It's getting old but everything runs OK so I'm not changing it.

 

CPU utilization is 41 percent

7 Days is using 7.2G of Memory.  It should go up or down as I travel to different areas. I suspect it will only go up.

Total CPU memory usage us 14.2G.  Other things are running. I listen to NPR as I play the game in the morning.

 

GPU memory is pegged at 3.3G. Four is the max.

Shared GPU memory is .1G out of 16G

GPU utilization  is at 70 percent.

 

Edit: When I quit, 7Days used 7.5G of memory. GPU didn't change.

Edited November 4, 2022 by ElCabong (see edit history)