» Sat May 28, 2011 1:19 am
I suppose there is more than one kind of Leak
One that may be caused by modders is the well discussed savegame bloating, where a mod generates new information and does not clean it up when it is not necessary anymore. These are easier to spot, as, sooner or later, players will notice their savegame size is increasing and will warn the modder.
Another one is the 'classical' memory leak that haunts most software developers. This, AFAIK, cannot be directly caused by modders.
I did some investigation after far327 noticed the increasing memory usage when using my Rock Your Ship mod and I did isolate a few situations where, using some specific script functions, seems to cause memory leak. After replacing them, the memory increase was reduced to less than half than before. So far, I could not isolate the cause of the residual leak. Maybe it is not even caused by scripts at all. Who knows?
This [very amateur] investigation left me the impression that some script functions, under some circumstances, may leak a few bytes of memory. Therefore, different players, with different sets of mods, may experience different memory increases, depending on which mods use which functions.
But, as I said, this is an impression, as I am not qualified to anolyze it further. It is not clear if the cause is OBSE or vanilla functions, but I reported it to the OBSE team as they may anolyze it, maybe confirm it and, being the case, fix it. They are quite busy, as usual, and we have to wait until they have a chance to diagnose it.
It is clear from the posts in this thread that Oblivion uses more and more memory over time. As with any software, there may be leaks in any function: graphics processing, havoc processing, weather processing, whatever. Hard for us, outsiders, to find, unless we stumble on one by chance, as was the case with Rock Your Ship extensively using a leaking function and far327 noticing it.