Dolphin using up way too much memory

twotonkatrucks · 03-30-2019, 05:04 PM #1

So while playing a certain Wii game for a few of hours (Xenoblade Chronicles), I ran out of virtual memory and had to force quit Dolphin. Dolphin seems to be eating up memory unboundedly. When I booted up the game again and started monitoring its memory use, I was getting above 13GB of memory usage within an hour of play.

I can't be sure if this is a new thing after recently updating Dolphin since I've never paid attention to its memory usage and had never had a cause to but, I'm guessing this isn't normal behavior.

Does anyone have any idea what might be going on here? Thanks in advance.

**Helios** · 03-30-2019, 05:13 PM #2

Are you using HD texture packs?

twotonkatrucks

(03-30-2019, 05:13 PM)Helios Wrote: Are you using HD texture packs?

No I am not. Also, if it helps to debug, I haven't changed any of the configuration settings from default except setting backend to Vulkan and setting internal resolution to 2x.

Also, I'm on a mac btw (the full specs of my macbook pro is in my profile).

EDIT: I downgraded to build 9832 and Dolphin no longer eats up memory. So something changed in one of the recent updates. When I have more time this weekend I'll try and narrow down the first instance where I see the memory gobbling behavior.

EDIT 2: Welp, that wasn't hard to find. The very next revision seems to be the culprit (9834). And from the note attached to it, it may be a MoltenVK issue. Here's the pull request note from github repository that was attached to 9834.
https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/7733

twotonkatrucks · 04-01-2019, 03:00 AM #4

Just bumping this thread for any macOS user that may be able to replicate this memory leak type behavior I'm seeing post 9832 revision. Thanks in advance!

twotonkatrucks · 04-01-2019, 03:40 AM #5

Some further experimentation:

1. I downloaded the latest build as of this moment, 9876.
2. I verified that the memory leak behavior is still happening.
3. I then downloaded older version of vulkan SDK, 1.1.97.0 and 1.1.92.1.
4. I swapped out the libvulkan.dylib included with the app with the older versions.

I noticed the same type of leaky behavior with 1.1.97.0 but 1.1.92.1 work perfectly and keeps the memory usage at the reasonable level.

This isn't definitively saying MoltenVK is a the culprit but, it seems to have some role in the behavior I'm seeing.