[0.17.10.0] Serious Memory Leak Issue

Tower unite has serious memory leak issue and this issue exist for long time.

On Linux using ZRAM or Swap doesn’t help still the leak serious enough to use all zram or swap memory.
Other players are also reporting this it happens regardless of OS or setup.

Steps to Reproduce

Visit a lot places; like places in plaza or visit many condos eventually the game will use like +15GB RAM.

Exiting to the main menu doesn’t clear the memory, garbage collector doesn’t do its job.

What I expected to happen

Using 4-8GB RAM as the Tower unite states in system requirements

What happened

The game or whole operating system crashed because I out of memory.

2 Likes

Seconding this, TU becomes incredibly unstable over time, especially when it comes to loading in custom workshop content. I will frequently face significant performance loss if not outright crashes in highly populated servers, matches, or condos with a high density of workshop items.

5 Likes

Thirding this.

The amount of technical debt the game is accumulating is astounding.

Including, but not limited to;

  • Crash to desktop bugs
  • Exploits that can kill Plaza servers
  • Many isolated instances of blurry textures
  • Broken shaders which can cause clients to crash when connecting to game worlds or condos (SDNL Hinderance, Water Cooler, Diamond Trophies)
  • Recurrent AGC downtime
  • Streaming/loading issues with the casino and the arcade (causing other players to appear fall out of the map and games like Pluck-a-pal to spaz out)
  • Questionable physics (Pluck-a-pal prizes being trapped in deadzones, bowling pins not being knocked down consistently)
  • All these “Optimisation Passes” essentially counting for nothing, as what little gains are made is given to more new features
  • Bloat and lag with condo workshop models
  • Physics-based minigames appearing to play themselves without player interaction (eg. Milk Jug Toss)
  • Arcade and boardwalk minigames exiting/finishing prematurely without player interaction
  • Some YouTube videos just straight up not playing (playback error)
1 Like

I have a suggestion- until this stuff gets fixed. I think it’d be very helpful to have Steam Workshop objects count displayed on Player Condos list to help players avoid load-heavy worlds.

Thoughts?

3 Likes

Since the bumper car update, the memory leak was severe. Even in an environment where it should be possible to play comfortably with graphics set to ultra, it was down to less than 25 FPS. The memory leak is serious, especially in the boardwalk area.

We know it’s their small team, but there are a lot of issues and unfinished areas in this game that have been left unfinished. Hence, they have to respond when players call them in, etc.

But as the workload piled up, even the Discord and chat moderators started to do sloppy work… ( banning users without carefully checking their comments)

However, it is clear that glitches and other problems are piling up too much.
There’s nothing we can do about it when their business gets under pressure.

1 Like

Regarding this memory leak, does disabling workshop resolve the issue?

I play Tower daily and I have not experienced the leak first hand.

Any insight on exactly what you were doing when it happens would be very helpful.


We don’t have chat moderators, only developers. We don’t issue out bans for reporting issues on our Discord and we often reply to them.

As you are very well aware of, this game is massive. It’s quite a feat and it’s very unique. A lot of the games we have developed don’t exist elsewhere or have multiplayer support. This makes for a challenging set of issues that get tackled every day. We are working away on improving things all the time.

  • We have not seen a huge rise of crashes, but we are often fixing crashes that come in that are reported to us using the crash dialogue. When you get a crash, please be as detailed as possible so we can figure it out. Some crashes can also be from bad installations and reverifying the game can resolve them.

  • We fix exploits all of the time, but we don’t make comments about them for obvious reasons. This game has a lot of different systems but we’ve been resolving these crashes as they are found.

  • Blurry textures can be a number of things, Workshop player models can use up more texture space than anticipated and the Unreal 4 texture streaming system will stream out textures without any priority over what. It’s really not the best texture streaming system and we’ve adjusted it in the past but certain textures just load in blurry for no obvious reason. If you’re experiencing this a lot, I suggest using the start up launch parameter -notexturestreaming

  • Broken shader issues that you have mentioned have been resolved. AMD was not playing well with depth shaders which we were using to improve the translucency effects on those items, but they have been resolved for months now.

  • AGC has been very stable for the past year now. We haven’t had much AGC downtime at all. There’s been behind the scenes work on improving it, which one major change was improving how inventory items are handled and batched to improve transactions.

  • Level steaming issues like that can be covered up with a longer load screen time, we rely on Unreal to tell us when the level is finished loading but it seems like for some players it doesn’t properly give us the right information so we’ll need to pad out the duration on those loading screens. Unfortunately, you can’t just remove the load in. We unstream and stream in those areas to help with performance.

  • These physics games are being ran on the server to network to other players. This is a very challenging task to resolve, but there are fixes to these games coming soon.

  • Optimization passes happen constantly. There’s a lot of work that is put into optimization, but it’s little by little. We have to finish the game and add the features we set out to make. Having the new features come in does make optimization harder, but the newer features are more optimized than the older ones. The bumper cars building for example has a better LOD system than the other older buildings.

  • Condo workshop models is a complex issue to address. Many models are totally fine and don’t cause lag, but some models can because of how they are authored. If you have a workshop model that is really large in size, it’s pretty clear that’s due to really HD textures - even if it’s not noticeable. In that case, it would be advised to use models that are smaller in file size.

  • YouTube videos having issues playing is not our fault. YouTube decided to change their playback formats to a proprietary format that has a huge licensing fee. We are looking into ways to resolve this.

1 Like