Memory leak?

[CorpCommander]

I am having severe performance issues with Hero Designer, it is causing my machine to thrash and slow to a crawl. I've been watching it with task manager and saw it was peaking around 100,000k for memory use! Since my machine only has around 128,000k in physical mem this is causing the whole machine to come to a crawl. When I closed all the active characters I got no memory back. I know that Java memory management isn't perfect (i.e. calls for garbage collection are stub functions) but this is insane. I am using version 1.47.

Is anyone else having the same problem?

[Simon]

Due to numerous issues (including the XML parser), there is a bare minimum requirement of 128MB for HD. This is listed on the purchase page and on the CD packaging.

If your system only has 128MB total RAM, you are almost certainly going to be running low pretty quickly (and hence running into swap space, which is what causes the slowdown that you're experiencing).

Ideally, you should be running HD on a system with more RAM. Failing that, if you do a search on these boards you will find several other threads which discuss this, including a small hack you can perform to limit the total memory that will be made available to HD (it is currently set at 128MB on your system....you can limit it to 64MB by editing the file HeroDesigner.lax).

Both the general performance on large characters as well as much of the memory requirements have been addressed for v2 of the app.

What you are seeing is not a leak....it's a slowdown due to an insufficient amount of memory on your system for HD.

[CorpCommander]

I have another machine I can use it on that has 512 megs of ram. I will run it there. I will also look into limiting the ram usage on this machine by editing the file you suggested. Thanks! I love the interface by the way. This is easily one of the best programs I've seen in a while. When my machine isn't running out of memory the software is wonderful to use! I am looking forward to v2 which I just read about.

Thanks Dan

[Simon]

Not a problem....one warning on editing HeroDesignger.flt: whenever you run HD, it will reset the memory settings in that file....so you'll want to keep an extra copy lying around to put in place whenever you start HD up.....not an elegant solution, but sometimes the best to be had on low-memory systems.

[Nechevo]

To get around that problem (the program reseting the HeroDesigner.flt file) I wrote a batch file that takes a copy of the edited file and copies that over the herodeisgner.flt file. That way before I run HeroDesigner I run the batch file first to copy the edited file then run HeroDesigner.

so the batch file looks like this:

del HeroDesigner.lax
copy HeroDesignerROMhack.lax HeroDesigner.lax

(end of batch file)

This assumes one is using Win 98 as I don't think XP has MS DOS batch files anymore.

[Killer Shrike]

Originally posted by Nechevo
To get around that problem (the program reseting the HeroDesigner.flt file) I wrote a batch file that takes a copy of the edited file and copies that over the herodeisgner.flt file. That way before I run HeroDesigner I run the batch file first to copy the edited file then run HeroDesigner.

so the batch file looks like this:

del HeroDesigner.lax
copy HeroDesignerROMhack.lax HeroDesigner.lax

(end of batch file)

This assumes one is using Win 98 as I don't think XP has MS DOS batch files anymore. You can still run batches in XP. I set up a few to move the entire HD directory from my main machine to my satellite computers bcs HD doesnt like UNCs. Takes a couple of minutes and requires versioning discipline, but it works.