Memory Fragmentation... Maybe?

[Rurik-Vaeringjar]

I've noticed a trend that seems to happen most often as I load into and out of the open world areas of the game repeatedly. It seems pretty clear that there's some kind of dynamic memory allocation happening but over time the game seems to get slower and slower until I start getting very strange errors that don't often repeat. Sounds that don't play entirely once or twice but then play fine after that or certain textures taking much longer to load than others or repeatedly disappearing and reappearing. It takes repeatedly loading into and out of places like the Orb Vallis/Plains of Eidolon into Fortuna/Cetus for this to start being even noticeable.

After it gets to this point, if I continue to play without restarting, then when I eventually leave the Orb Vallis/Plains of Eidolon or Fortuna/Cetus to the Orbiter it will result in a crash or exponentially increased load times. If I restart the game every few load cycles it continues running smooth as butter. I'm running a GTX 960 with an admittedly dated CPU, AMD FX 4100, and 8 gigs (16 gigs dual channel) RAM. Warframe runs exceedingly well in Fortuna, Plains, and all other game content thus far. The only time it struggles is if I repeatedly leave and enter one of the open world areas. I know I'm not the only person to have problems like this and while I'm willing to believe it's just an error in the way my system is set up, I still find myself wondering if it's not a problem with memory fragmentation caused by however warframe allocates memory.

This isn't normally a problem anyone has to think about, but I can most certainly imagine a situation where Warframe's growth as of late might cause something like that to appear where it wouldn't have in any other part of the game. I'm also willing to believe I'm just talking out of my ass here as I have no idea how to reliably test the amount of memory fragmentation caused by warframe running for an extended period of time or after repeatedly allocating and freeing up memory when loading the open world areas. When I consider that alongside the fact that I know you have very good programmers, with years of experience working on game engines, I can't help but think that whatever memory allocation you're using for warframe already deals with whatever fragmentation might occur.

Still, in the off chance that I'm even close to stumbling on the answer for why the game keeps slowing down, then I feel I need to bring it to your attention and sooner rather than later. If there are issues with memory fragmentation appearing now, then it's only going to get worse until it becomes a very big problem in the long term. In essence, the longer that problem goes uncorrected, the harder it becomes to fix. That's why, without knowing if this actually is a problem, I wanted to bring it to someone's attention if only to guarantee that someone on the dev team hears about it in the minuscule chance it's been overlooked. If I do find anything more concrete, I will post what I've found as soon as it becomes known to me.
 

Edited November 11, 2018 by Rurik-Vaeringjar
Fixing my atrocious grammar...

[SolidSnake8774]

I've noticed this too. Its even more evident when entering and leaving orb vallis with how it is.  And normal play in regular missions end up slowing down and stuttering.  I do have to exit the whole client and restart now even to simply play Orb Vallis solo with less stutter (As Orb Vallis is not very well optimized). I cant enter Orb Vallis more than 2 before the load becomes near unplayable.