With dozens of browser tabs open alongside the game, the OS moves part of the game’s memory out to disk.
Why The PC runs low on RAM overall → Effect The OS moves game memory that isn’t in use right now to disk → On screen The moment that memory is used again, the game freezes for tens to hundreds of ms, depending on storage
Primary owner External (External) · Also Game team (Client development)
Game team action items
Reduce memory usage, show a warning when free memory is low.
External action items
Tell players the minimum specs and to close other programs (such as browser tabs) while playing.
On the graph
Random spikes · Hard page faults, memory usage
Where to look
Record Memory\Pages Input/sec (pages read from disk to resolve hard page faults) in Performance Monitor and memory usage and commit on Task Manager’s Performance tab, together with frame time
Confirmed if
Pages Input/sec spikes at the moment of each freeze and memory is nearly full. Closing the browser and other programs makes it go away
Ruled out if
Memory has headroom and Pages Input/sec stays quiet: “Synchronous loading and shader compilation on the main thread” or “Slow storage delays asset streaming”
Check with
The player’s own environment
Sources
Introduction to the page fileMicrosoft The page file is a file on disk used to move rarely used, modified memory pages out of RAM
Working SetMicrosoft Touching a page that isn’t in RAM causes a page fault; a hard fault can only be resolved by reading from disk, such as from the page file