One of my team’s games is experiencing Animation category memory leaks - it’s consistently the fastest growing category reported in dev console. Servers only last about ~17 hours and it’s hurting metrics. Older servers need to be joined to see this.
There is no way to break down memory usage by animation ID in dev console, so it’s very difficult for me to pinpoint what is causing this.
I’ve tried rapidly respawning NPCs and players mid-animation, simulating AnimationTrack event connections without disconnection, but I can’t reproduce it - memory clears up correctly in those simulations.
I verified that there are a normal amount of Animator (and their running track counts) and Animation descendants in the DataModel, so they always seem to be destroyed correctly.
Expected behavior
The category should stabilize, not increase indefinitely.
Bump, it still is the fastest growing category in the console, like OP said, we can’t track down which asset is causing this because we can’t see the IDs like in the Sounds category, any updates on this?
I could speculate as to a cause but what’s the hope without the codebase. I may have my own server memory leaks in my game, but the rising star is always Animations. For now I will minimize LoadAnimation calls, to uncertain efficacy. Calling :Destroy on AnimationTracks does not seem to help, not that I thought it would.
I don’t think you’re seeing a memory leak here. Internally, the engine holds an LRU cache for all AnimationClips. This cache will get flushed if it exceeds a certain memory size and you’ll pay the cost of loading and unloading clips at that point, however, the numbers you show on the graph are far below that threshold.
Here is a more extreme case of cloning a R15 rig of myself and playing every animation, then deleting the rig and repeating it. Seems to hang onto over 150MB in the recording, 370MB now that I wrote this out.
Should memory clear in this situation? I don’t know the thresholds for MB, time, or the conditions for cache flushing. I know in my actual game, Animations can reach nearly a GB, proportional to the amount of player sessions.
Still noticing this for our game.
Rises to 1.5GB or so. If that’s the cache, then it should be cleared much sooner.
Animations shouldn’t take up 25% of the total memory limit (6.25GB).
Thanks for your feedback!
In the past week we’ve made changes to the way Animation memory is cached in the game.
Are any of you continuing to see unbounded growth?
This is accomplished using the following script (assuming workspace.Rig):
R = workspace.Rig
R.Parent = nil
while true do
local rig = R:Clone()
rig.Parent = workspace
local animator = rig.Humanoid.Animator
local ats = {}
for _, sv in rig.Animate:GetChildren() do
local anim = sv:FindFirstChildOfClass("Animation")
if anim then
local at = animator:LoadAnimation(anim)
at:Play()
table.insert(ats, at)
end
end
task.wait()
rig:Destroy()
for _, at in ats do
at:Destroy()
end
end
Thankyou for you feedback!
What kind of animations did you use to produce this behavior, ordinary character animations or huge, long lasting ones?
How many different animations did you use?
We have not succeeded in replicating these results using default avatar animations.
Thanks again!
