[0.18.2.0] Workshop Memory Leak Issue

Bug Report
1

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 it happens on Windows which means not Linux specific.

Steps to Reproduce

Make sure workshops are enabled.

Visit a lot places; that requires to use workshop (especially condos) eventually the game will use like +15GB RAM.

Exiting to the main menu doesn’t clear the memory.

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.

3 Likes
2

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.

6 Likes
3

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)
2 Likes
4

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?

Screenshot_5263
Screenshot_52631339×437 220 KB

6 Likes
5

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.

2 Likes
6

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.

4 Likes
7

it seems yes, I didn’t experience a memory leak since the Linux workshop issue. Now the game constantly using 5-5.5 GB memory.

1 Like
8

After workshops are fixed on Linux with v0.17.12.0 the leak started to happen again. In plaza under 30 minutes the game used 7.5GB memory then it crashed.

9

v0.18.2.0 still has memory leak

10

Couldn’t this be an permanently enabled thing? I think it would be useful anyway - There are people who like to visit Condos made with multiple Workshop objects but there are also those who want to see what can be achieved with in-game items.

11

Bumping this, 0.18.3.0 seems to still have this memory leak issue. I followed OP’s steps to reproduce and got the same result. My operating system crashes.

Some system information:
OS: Linux Mint 22 Cinnamon (Cinnamon version 6.2.9)
CPU: Intel© Core™ i5-9300H CPU @ 2.40GHz × 4
GPUs: integrated - Intel Corporation CoffeeLake-H GT2 [UHD Graphics 630]; dedicated (what Tower Unite is actually using) - NVIDIA Corporation TU117M [GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile / Max-Q].
Installed Memory: 16GB (15.5 usable)

Information about how I am running Tower Unite on Steam:
-Proton version: GE-Proton9-20
-Launch options: mangohud %command% gamemoderun %command% -notexturestreaming -useallavailablecores -nosplash

12

another thing to note, when I turn off workshop support in Tower Unite settings and entered a Public hosted condo (house map) where all workshop addons were successfully blocked, mangohud showed that RAM usage never exceeded 7.5GB. With workshop turned on I entered another Public condo also on the house map, all the workshop furniture loaded and mangohud showed 15.1GB RAM usage at the frame right before my operating system crashed.

13

I think there’s VRAM leaking now, too

14

I HAVE EVIDENCE THAT THIS MIGHT NOT BE A BUG WITH TOWER UNITE SPECIFICALLY, BUT RATHER LINUX NOT CORRECTLY HANDLING HYBRID GRAPHIC SYSTEMS/USER ERROR.

I went through a journey with my own thread in the linux mint forums, as multiple games were causing system crashes for me. It was found that my system was not correctly utilizing my nvidia GPU (for reference, I also have integrated intel graphics on this laptop).

When my NVIDIA PRIME profile was set to “On-Demand” and I input this command in my system terminal

DRI_PRIME=1 glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"

this would be the output:

glx: failed to create dri3 screen
failed to load driver: nouveau
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630 (CFL GT2)

AFTER SWITCHING NVIDIA PRIME PROFILE TO PERFORMANCE MODE
the same input gave this output instead, the actual name of my nvidia gpu:

OpenGL renderer string: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 with Max-Q Design/PCIe/SSE2

After this, I launch Tower Unite with DirectX 10 and these launch options (also still using proton version GE-Proton9-20)

__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __VK_LAYER_NV_optimus=NVIDIA_only __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia gamemoderun mangohud %command% -notexturestreaming -useallavailablecores -nosplash

After this, I turned on workshop support in Tower Unite settings and joined two different Public Condos that were on Smooth Dirt map, hence these places had large builds including workshop items.

I NEVER CRASHED, AND MANGOHUD SHOWED THAT RAM USAGE NEVER EXCEEDED 12GB.

I would encourage OP to try out what I have if they also have a hybrid graphics system. If crashes stop occurring I would consider rescinding this bug report, as this might make these issues not a bug to Tower Unite itself.

1 Like