Topic
RAM use/monitoring over time (performance)
Firstly, I had a lot of fun playing the game the other evening and am looking forward to the next testing window!
Regarding memory and performance, I noticed that with an older version of Flash 10 (OS X/Snow Leopard), Firefox 3.6 went from around 500 MB to 1.3 GB of memory use between having ~20 tabs open and having played the game for maybe half an hour.
The game began with a great framerate, low memory footprint and smooth motion, but slowly degraded to jerky/laggy motion and very low framerates over time as RAM use increased, eventually causing much swapping to disk etc. and making Firefox quite grumpy.
After installing the new 10.1 beta 2 plugin, the game seemed to stay faster/more responsive for longer intervals - perhaps due to somewhat-lowered memory use - but eventually it became slow again, using ~800 MB for the single tab by the time I reloaded. (It looked like reloading released all of that memory, FWIW!)
Obviously, some amount of images and/or data isn't being freed as the user goes through numerous scenes. I might have seen a number like ~10 MB added per "signpost entry" that loaded(?)
A side-thought, it might be interesting to capture and/or graph memory use and flash/OS version info vs. gameplay over time, to see if there are trends or particularly-expensive bits. I think Flash's System.totalMemory() method may report RAM for all instances of the plugin in the current browser combined vs. a per-tab/movie number, but it may still provide some useful numbers.
Again, a very entertaining game thus far, keep up the good work etc. :)
- Schill (AKA "Doc Brown" in Glitch-land? ;))
