Developer Console & Memory Management lacking

:warning: This is going to be a bit ranty and lengthy, so please bare with me…

TL;DR

The current page on the Developer Console has less than sufficient information on many of the scripting-related memory-management categories such that only advanced users could understand. See Conclusion…


The Problems/Ranting

One of the most underlying universal issues when creating a game (especially large ones) has to do with memory management (particularly scripting-related memory), and one of the more useful tools to help you with that would be the Developer Console… or rather it should be.

This is what we have for the memory tab in the console:

Some categories with a lot of sub-categories, slightly different between the Client and Server. At first glance, you’re not going to know what any of this means, hence why the developer console page was put in. However, the page itself really lacks in a lot of areas. For what is currently there, it does well enough to explain how you can manage certain parts of it except for anything scripting-related.

Looking at this one in particular… :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Unless you’re an advanced coder, or if you’re someone like me who started coding many years ago on Roblox via trial and error (and then research when the hub came to be a thing), you’re going to have no idea how to do that. There are also a LOT of these categories missing, and next-to-nothing on how to manage their usage. What is internal/luasignal? Network/replicator? Physics/broadphase? And of course the dreaded UntrackedMemory which often causes the most problems. I’m not even sure if half of these can even be managed by us and if it isn’t just parts of Roblox we have no control over.


In Conclusion…

It would be much appreciated if there were some actual explanations or examples on what we can do to manage our memory via coding, or at the very least some link taking us somewhere we can learn this ourselves so we don’t have to be in the dark or resort to filling up #help-and-feedback:scripting-support with questions that’ll ultimately be left unanswered.

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