I have experienced quite a few Out of Memory errors recently (even on short flights), and they are starting to annoy me. This is when approaching dense scenery areas. Sometimes I can just about get away with it if the flight is extremely short (maybe 20 miles or less), but what's the point of that? I do not understand why this is happening so frequently on my Windows 7 64bit/i5 2500k @ 4.3Ghz/8GB RAM/1GB GeForce GTX 560Ti powered system, even though I run FSX at very high detail levels. Surely a system as powerful as mine should be able to cope with almost anything that FSX can throw at it?

 

I am starting to wonder if there is a more serious issue, like a memory leak. I just get the feeling that FSX is loading graphics into memory as I fly, but some of this is "getting stuck" in memory, and thereby increasing the load on the system. How do I check for something like that?

 

For the record, I fly exclusively in the UK, and have the following addons installed.....

 

PlayHorizon VFR Generation X Version 3 England and Wales

PlayHorizon VFR Scotland Volumes 4/5/8

TreeScapes England and Wales

TreeScapes Scotland South

Scotflight 2.3 Photo

UK2000 Xtreme airports (all of them)

UK2000 VFR Airfields Volumes 1/2/3

Earth Simulations Alderney

Earth Simulations Guernsey

Earth Simulations Isles of Scilly

Earth Simulations Shawbury Fields

VFR London X

Ultimate Traffic 2

REX2

FSX Power Project (freeware)

 

I generally experience these OOM issues when approaching VFR London X from distance, or when flying between two of the UK2000 Xtreme airports (and maybe passing other dense scenery during the flight). However, these are relatively short flights (never more than 100 miles).

 

Does anyone have any ideas? It seems that the generally accepted view is that it is rather difficult to get OOM errors in FSX under Windows 7 64bit, and yet I have suffered plenty of them

That's a lot of UK stuff there. Especially the London area tends to become very heavy and memory demanding when you combine VFR London X with some areas from PlayHorizon and the UK 'Extremes'. I had a lot of trouble with VFR London X when the city part (the tons of buildings) were enabled and coming in with the Concorde or NGX to land at Heathrow, but overflying London city.

 

From my attempts, leaving out that city part saved some hundreds of megabyte, which then acted as a buffer, therefore leaving the sim out of that oom range. Could have been my system only, but I'd say that the older and demanding tech of VFR London X added one too much in the above scenario.

 

Not writing that it comes with a memory leak or something by design, but running FSX that dense around London (means the addon combination) plus flying a demanding plane seems to get you very close or beyond the stable limits. VAS is eaten up and you get the oom message. That's with Win7 64bits.

I have never received OOM errors in FSX and your system is similar to mine, but I have no scenery upgrades.

 

If want to try and get an idea where your memory pressure issue is occurring, I would recommend firing up the very useful performance monitor utility.

 

If you are not technologically challenged, the utility isn't too difficult to learn to configure, though it might take a little time to learn to interpret the output.

 

Perfmon comes with Windows and it is capable of monitoring a large number of system parameters and recording the data over extended periods of time.

 

I would set the monitor up to observe page file, ram, os cache, video ram and FSX application memory paging and physical usage to begin with. You should be able to see which of the parameters are spiking.

 

Using this tool you can measure the impact of any changes you make in FSX or even spot a memory leak.

Join the club....

 

Here's why they're starting to pop up:

 

We buy these ultra fast systems, crank the sliders, and add nice addons.

 

Then we get OOM's. It would almost be better to not have an ultra fast pc hehe... or just avoid addons.

I just noticed CoolP's comment about the VAS being used up by all the scenery objects. It makes sense, and not much can be done about that. :(

CoolP,

 

What do you mean by "leaving out the city part" of VFR London X?

Isn't it now the case that FSUIPC has an audible warning, a Windows error 'wav' when Windows is running low on resources.

 

I have been running my GenX/Earth Simulations trees scenery at 8.5 LOD bias with an 'on the fly' RAM scrubber utility for a relatively short time, about an hour now, trying to provoke an OOM event, but haven't yet suffered one. I am flying the default Cessna at around 2000' with 5/8 cumulus around.

 

I have 4G of RAM (32 bit OS) with the BCDEDIT fix below, therefore making available around 3G. My FSX uses about 2.5 G of that with a 'commit charge' of upwards of 4 G, yet I don't get an OOM error.

 

I don't know if you'd like to try a freeware RAM utility that will recover RAM when you start running low, but that's what I'm trying.

What does this "RAM scrubber" do, and where can I get it? I assume that it clears RAM of unnecessary crap (ie. stuff that I passed 20 minutes ago), but I don't want it to "scrub" anything within visual range!

I had this EXACT same problem yesterday. Was just crossing the english channel east of london and FSX crashed. I was flying the PMDG MD-11 to EDDK. I spent hours on a wild goose chase but have narrowed it down to FSX Power Project, it also has a bad memory leak. Disable it and see what happens.

 

BTW, long time lurker first time poster here. I just couldn't sit back and let this go after dealing with this exact same thing not even 24hours ago.

What do you mean by "leaving out the city part" of VFR London X?

As far as I remember, you have two scenery entries. One is the airport EGLC and the other one is the city with all the custom buildings. That city part eats a lot of memory and may therefore be a nice target to lower the consumption. So if you have plenty of other UK stuff installed and are running some planes like Concorde X or NGX, you may want to look out for the memory savings. Those two planes are very sensible when it comes to resources in my eyes and that crowded London area (when running addons) may then be too much for good old FSX.

 

That open structure of FSX is nice for sure, but I think that some UK fans add a ton to the sim, thanks to the opportunities. So even if there is no memory leak involved, the oom problem may occur.

Well, now that is very interesting. I have contacted the developer of the FSX Power Project several times (to let him know of missing pylons, incomplete links etc), so I will send him a message regarding this. Thanks for the information.

I just want to add, about the memory leak; FSX was using up to 3.5GB of RAM and with no other changes except disabling FSX power project memory usage has went down to the 1.3-1.5GB range. This is with GEX, REX, UK2000 EGLC and EGLL, PMDG MD-11, and much more than I can remember off the top of my head.

I have experienced quite a few Out of Memory errors recently (even on short flights), and they are starting to annoy me. (...)

It seems that the generally accepted view is that it is rather difficult to get OOM errors in FSX under Windows 7 64bit, and yet I have suffered plenty of them

 

It is possible to get OOM erros while flying FSX even in 64bits enviroment if you have high settings, dense scenery and lots of add-ons.

 

FSX is 32 bits application running, in your case, in 64 bits system. According to Microsoft information 32 bits process on 64-bits Windows OS may use up to 4GB of virtual adress space if this process is compiled with "IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE" flag. If you are using FSX with SP2 installed you are able to use benefits of 4GB of virtual adress space as it has "IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE" flag set.

 

If you suffer from OOM errors, you simply need to check size of virtual adress space allocated by FSX thread. It is something different than used memory you may check under Task Manager. Task Manager doesn't show size of used virtual adress space but only allocated physical memory. Applications under normal circumstances always are using more virtual adress space than physical.

To check how much of virtual adress space is using FSX in your case, you need to get Process Explorer, ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653 ) run it and right click on the "Process" table header > Select Colums > Process Memory Tab > and mark "Virtual Size" then run FSX under the same conditions as earlier.

 

If you will see "virtual size" for FSX thread closely reaching up to 4194304 K that means you reached at the end of possibilities avaliable for 32bits application in 64bits enviroment. Only you may do is reducing memory demand caused by FSX. Some possible solutions: reducing settings of LOD_RADIUS, TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD, autogen density.

I think there are not many options when you experience OOMs (and you are on a 64bit OS already):

• use DX10 preview
  
• FSUPIC's autosave feature is supposed to free some memory (haven't tried this myself)
  
• lower your scenery detail settings or disable some addon sceneries
  

Choose your poison!

It seems that Zboe is on the right track regarding FSX Power Project being the cause of the problem. I had been attempting to fly from Luton to London City (a distance of only 31 miles) in the Flight1 Cessna Citation Mustang. I had reduced the UT2 AI airliner traffic density to 50%, the Scenery Complexity and Autogen Density to DENSE, switched off Heathrow Xtreme, Gatwick Xtreme, and Stansted Xtreme, and reduced the AA and AF settings to 4xS and 8x respectively. I just managed to get right downwind of runway 27 at London City before the PFD and MFD froze, and that was quickly followed by a CTD and "out of memory message". This was my third attempt at this flight, gradually reducing complexity settings for each flight, but without success.

 

Then I read Zboe's suggestion about FSX Power Project.

 

So, I decided to disable FSX Power Project. To make things interesting, I then reactivated Stansted Xtreme, increased the UT2 traffic density to 100%, increased the Scenery Complexity and Autogen Density settings to EXTREMELY DENSE, and increased AA and AF to 8xS and 16x respectively.

 

Guess what? I completed the flight. The only glitch I noticed was that the PFD and MFD had frozen when I was in the process of shutting down. Nevertheless, I get the feeling that it would have taken a lot longer to go from that position to a CTD if any "memory leak" problem had been eliminated by disabling FSX Power Project.

 

I may have disabled Heathrow Xtreme and Gatwick Xtreme, but this result was still a MASSIVE improvement. I will have to conduct further tests, but this single experiment has made me think that FSX Power Project could be the main cause of my problems. Time will tell.