~10Mb/s Memory leak on Nobara Linux 43 (Fedora)

[GlitterVappy]

I am experiencing a really bad memory leak while running Dwarf Fortress from Steam - it appears to be only with DFHack enabled. I am not sure how to pinpoint what is causing this, but it is alarming. Memory usage details enclosed via screenshots of top -h -p [dwarf fortress pid]

this is bad enough that it eventually runs the Out Of Memory Killer.

if there is any other information i could provide that would be helpful as to pinpoint the issue, i would be glad to help.

[buz4s]

same on arch, only way to mitigate is to close the game and run: echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches (or reboot), with 32 GB ram, it takes about 30-40 min to fill up.

[ab9rf]

I've heard a number of reports of DF (both with and without DFHack) leaking memory on various Linux configurations. My suspicion is that this is due to the way DF abuses SDL surfaces, which is very nonstandard and may well be surfacing deficiencies in SDL (either original SDL2 or SDL3 running with SDL2-compat, as many Linux distributions are now doing) or in GPU drivers. As these behaviors have been reported for users running without DFHack, it seems likely that this is fundamentally a base game defect.

This isn't something the DFHack team can, in general, mitigate. My recommendation, such as it is, is that you consider not using SDL3 + SDL2-compat with DF, and/or consider rolling your GPU driver (or other components of the GPU rendering chain on your system) back to a version which does not exhibit the unwanted behavior, when used in connection with DF.

[quietust]

A few questions:

1. Is the "in-game" memory bloat happening while the game is paused or while it's unpaused?
2. Are you running in Classic ASCII mode or Premium Graphics mode?
3. Which DFHack tools do you have loaded?
4. Are you using SDL2, or are you using SDL3 with SDL2-compat?

On Linux Mint 21 with SDL2, I loaded a savegame in ASCII mode with no special tools enabled and left it paused, and memory usage hasn't been increasing by any notable amount:

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND  
 174398 quietust  20   0 2387308   1.9g 100916 S  40.2   6.2   0:14.35 dwarfort 
 174398 quietust  20   0 2452976   2.0g 105012 R  45.2   6.3   0:21.19 dwarfort 
 174398 quietust  20   0 2453108   2.0g 105012 S  36.9   6.3   0:30.77 dwarfort 
 174398 quietust  20   0 2453108   2.0g 105012 S  39.5   6.3   0:42.60 dwarfort 
 174398 quietust  20   0 2453268   2.0g 105012 S  38.2   6.3   0:50.19 dwarfort 
 174398 quietust  20   0 2453268   2.0g 105012 S  41.2   6.3   1:00.32 dwarfort 

[GlitterVappy]

@quietust

1. The increase happens during all times of operating the game.
2. The premium graphics mode exhibits this, I have not checked it yet with ascii
3. I'm running dfhack off of steam, i don't know how to check loaded modules
4. the only sdl2 packages I can find with dnf search are sdl2-compat, so I imagine I'm running sdl3.