What Is A Memory Leak?

I'm not a very tech savy person, just curious on what exactly is a memory leak and how would you fix it?

My thought is a memory leak is when some feature is using way more memory than it needs to.

But as i said I'm useless with technology so I may be way off.

So just looking for clarity from people who know.

Thanks.

 

10 seconds of googling yielded the following..

"
A memory leak in a game occurs when a program allocates memory for an object or resource but fails to release it when it's no longer needed. This can lead to performance issues, crashes, and user frustration.

Here are some signs of a memory leak:

• The amount of memory used increases over time
  
  
• The memory use is not typical of the programs being run or the current load on the system
  
  
• The computer becomes less responsive or is entirely stuck
  

Memory leaks are a common problem in modern software and can be caused by programming oversights. They can be diagnosed by a programmer with access to the program's source code.

Memory leaks are not permanent, and there is no physical defect."

 

It wasnt sarcasm.
It took me 10 seconds of googling. The implication being that a little effort results in a desired outcome.
Not sure assumptions about your customers are really constructive either. Its certainly not a good way of representing the brand.

 

Eh, I probably wouldn't knock the OP for asking a question even if it was a simple one. Sometimes you Google something, other times you ask someone. Merit to both in my view.

 

Its not knocking the OP. Its suggesting that they could have found a solution quite easily.
Yes theres merit to both, but I generally like to at least attempt to find an answer first.

 

I did google but as someone who isn't tech savy it didn't make sense to me.

I figured someone can explain it better here. So please.don't insunuate I'm stupid.

Thanks.

 

Oh. Right. I'm sorry, I misinterpreted it.

 

Nobodies insinuating youre stupid either.

 

It helps if you try to visualise things by using analogies.

Imagine a house with some apartments. There's families moving in there ( = memory allocation), soon the house is full. Now some families move on, because of jobs or other things, leaving the flats but don't "log out". Eventually, the house is deserted but is still listed as occupied, so the flats aren't for rent anymore.

My coding skills are fairly basic (mostly from Amiga days, MC68k Assembler, BASIC and C), but one of the important thing was to make sure in your code each AllocMem() was somewhere followed by FreeMem(). In modern complex programs, this cannot be made sure anymore, which even coder legend John Carmack admitted (initially being against the use of GarbageCollectors because he said it would support lazy coding - but you cannot do without anymore due to the complexity of modern programs.)

 

Hey Matt, now i'm wondering, in what is TSW5 being programmed?

 

Not Matt, but UE/TSW is based on C++ code, which is the enhanced and object orientated version of original (procedural) C, with the TSW data being constructed of interconnected "blueprints" having nodes for input and output.

The main difference between procedural and object oriented coding is that in procedural coding (C), you're giving more or less clear instructions, you have to know exactly how the program should act, resulting in very fast code (it's used for coding Operating Systems still), whereas in C++ you're basically defining objects and classes and let them interact based on their properties, which makes it easy to make games, as the way the objects interact is emerging from their given props.

 

With spelling like that I should hope not.

 

There is a lot of disinformation in this thread. A memory leak happens when a programmer forgets to give back (free) memory that he previously reserved when it is no longer needed. That is the memory leak.

If you continuously reserve memory but do not give it back, at some point you end up running out of memory to reserve.

Usually, a user only really notices a memory leak if it is happening so frequently that it ends up causing an out of memory error, which most of the time causes the program to crash.

Sometimes you will notice the program runs slow before crashing. That is because when the OS is close to running out of physical memory for the program it tries to use your (much slower) hard drive as a substitute. This is what is called using virtual memory.

Of course this is a simplification of what really happens, but I feel is the level that most people can easily understand.

 

Not exactly that. When you compile a C++ program you get assembly code, and its not very different from compiled C code. Objects help humans to understand how the data is organized, but your processor actually does not use them.

The problem is that if you want Visual C++ to keep track of how you use the memory ("manage" your memory) it needs to add additional code that does it at compile time. This is done by Visual C++ automatically if you use "managed" memory, but it uses more memory and makes your code run slower.

When you make a game, you usually need to run the code as fast as possible, because you need fast framerate, and you want to have as much memory available as possible.

So programmers do not use automatically managed memory for games. They take care of it themselves (and sometimes make mistakes, as we all do).

 

Depends on the platform. On PC, this is only the case with 32bit apps, as they only have 2GB virtual adress space. On 64bit? As memory virtualization is a thing, you will get into heavy stutters as OS will start to utilize page file more, but out of memory error generally happens only if the user disables page file, or limits its size.

Unity is written in C#...

 

Correction (I would edit, but forum thinks I'm a spammer )... Unity core is C++, but it's scripting language (what developers use to do game logic) is C#

 

To put it more simple (Via Programming Wisdom):

"Memory leaks are like water leaks: they happen when you least expect it, take hours to locate and make you wish you had spent more time protecting your valuables." – Fred Heath

 

Thank you all.

 

And sometimes you get classics like the old "Page fault in unpaged area" bluescreen.


Also, on the topic of virtual memory, I remember when SSDs first began taking off commercially in the 2010s and the advice was always to disable windows' automatic virtual memory management, for fear of damaging the SSD through constant write cycles from using it for that. I'd always handled it manually myself, and tended to run systems with a minimum of 32GB of physical memory, so it was never an issue that came up.

 

Now whose getting personal..

 

#Who's

 

Aargh my spelling compulsion was also triggered but I resisted posting.
Never mind, one for the road: #savvy