Hammer is resource hogger...

[Geronimous]

Well. I was working on my map and after a period of time my system kept locking up and started acting weird. (the start menu no longer contained anything, in Steam not a single game was longer available, all textures in my map where missing all of the sudden, the SDK was no longer available)

My specs are not bad with Athlon 2800+, 512 Mb ram (Ok, I'd like 1024), Radeon 9800XT, and a clean and protected system. Steam is clean.

So I started digging, and in the end found the problem:
Hammer keeps eating system resources!!!

The biggest problem was the texture browser:
my map is now around 1.5 Mb in size. So the size of occupied resources was not that huge. I opened the Material Browser and started scrolling down (no filters). after scrolling about a quarter, Hammer was occuping over 200 Mb! And even that closing the texture browser, or even closing the map did not make it drop!

This is a very significant bug so it seems, does anyone else have similar problems?
;(

 

[Geronimous]

Update:

I found a running thread about this bug on the VERC forums, so it is a known issue at Valve's:

http://www.chatbear.com/board.plm?a=viewthread&t=567,1103748551,14373&b=4986&id=773098&v=flatold&s=0

 

[m00b]

It does that to me too. It seems to be leaking or something... :/

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Until the exact solution is found, some users have reported that closing the SDK Launcher and the Steam Play Games menu after launching Hammer prevents the problem from occurring. If you're having this issue, you may want to see if that solves the issue for you.

That seems to work for me, I've been doing that for weeks Just close the steam menus after you are done with them....

 

[Geronimous]

yeah tried that - doesn't work for me.

which is an absolute b*tch to me.
I cannot work properly. my map is now expanding fast and hammer's need for memory is just killing my machine when I work. I have a feeling I keep Windows Xp's head under water as soon as I start working in Steam now... hehe (gives a weird satisfaction too though )

I was planning to expand my RAM size anyway, so I think I am going to speed up those plans.

My pagefile and harddrives are working overtime

 

[Dario D.]

Mappers should have at least 1 gig of RAM, or you'll have a rough time.

That's what I use, and it *barely* makes it on engines like Unreal Engine 2 (UT2004) and Hammer. I even run out of ram sometimes.

If you have 3 RAM slots (which you do), you should put a 512 chip into each of them. My 1024 mb RAM still isn't enough for mapping. :O

512 mb of RAM is going to include a LOT of loading things repetitously. Textures load, then are dumped into the paging file, then are reloaded from the paging file, back and forth without stopping. The paging file is a file on the hard drive like any other that needs to be loaded.

 

[Geronimous]

Guess you're right. Got a reply from Jeff Lane explaining it as well.

Well. just ordered my new RAM modules!