The longer the game stays open, the more memory it uses; it gets slower and slower until the game is eventually force-closed.
Why Textures, UI, and effects aren’t released when moving between areas → Effect GC runs more often, and the OS runs short of memory and starts swapping → On screen After hours of play it stutters more and more, then gets force-closed (looks like a disconnect to the player)
Measure memory usage at area transitions, find and fix textures, UI, and effects that never get released, run long automated tests (soak tests).
On the graph
Slow climb · Game process memory
Where to look
Record Process(game)\Private Bytes in Performance Monitor for a few hours. On mobile, the exit reason in Android’s ApplicationExitInfo (REASON_LOW_MEMORY) and iOS jetsam reports
Confirmed if
Memory goes up every time the player moves between areas and never comes back down, and stutter and forced shutdowns increase the longer the game runs
Ruled out if
Memory stays flat, and the only thing that grows with uptime is shaking: “Float time precision loss”
Check with
The player’s own environment
Learn more
Phones mostly hold out by compressing memory. If memory still runs short, the OS shuts the game down on the spot (players see it as getting kicked out). Devices with less RAM get shut down first.
Sources
Memory allocation among processesAndroid (Google) Android holds out by compressing memory into zRAM; when that’s not enough, the low memory killer terminates processes, and a foreground app being killed looks like a crash
ApplicationExitInfoAndroid (Google) REASON_LOW_MEMORY: the system’s low memory killer terminated the app process (devices that don’t support it report REASON_SIGNALED with SIGKILL)