Question about SoulseekQt RAM usage

thescarletfire's picture

Nir,

Just a quick question about RAM for you. I have a Win7 PC with 8GB RAM, i7, about 14 months old and I'm using the newest version of SoulseekQt.

I've noticed that over time, say for about 6-8 hours, Soulseek tends to suck up RAM, big time. Sometimes using 1500MB of RAM.

Now, can you share a little more about how RAM works with SoulseekQt, for example:

1) Does RAM usage increase depending on how many files you are sharing or what's currently downloading/uploading?
2) Should a user who is sharing 200,000 files expect RAM usage to be significantly higher than a user sharing 500 files?
3) Is there any way to throttle/control Soulseek's usage of RAM? Must I restart the client in order to clear this RAM chunk? etc.

I ask because, I never have more than 2 downloads / 2 uploads simultaneously going at any time, so I know that can't be the problem - however, on this machine I am sharing over 200,000 files.

The client never crashes, per se, but it does majorly suck my machine's resources over time.

Can you offer some feedback/tips on this RAM situation for us power users? :) Thank you!

Scarlet

Hey Scarlet,

The number of files you're sharing is usually the first factor in how much memory SoulseekQt ends up taking. As I've admitted many times before, SoulseekQt is not very memory efficient. You can read a little bit about it here. One other thing you can do when SoulseekQt ends up taking a lot of memory is create a dump of the internal database, ideally after you've run the client for a while and it's anywhere close to those 1500 megabytes of RAM and send the dump to me. To do so make sure the diagnostics tab is enabled via Options->UI (ideally don't enable it until you're creating the dump), then use the Dump Data button that appears when you're viewing the Diagnostics tab. This should generate a very big file. How big I'm not sure. Once you compress it and send it to me I should hopefully be able to use it to see what the biggest culprits are in your case.

Thanks, Nir

thescarletfire's picture

I'll do that diag-dump later tonight for you, no problem. So, adding more RAM to my server machine won't really "do" anything to lessen the way Soulseek uses RAM then - OK that's fine, I'm glad I know now. Thanks!

Keep you posted.

S

Thanks Scarlet! Should be interesting to see what's going on there.

thescarletfire's picture

Is there any personal/identifying information in the Dump Data that could perhaps compromise my identity? I noticed that if I try to open the dump in Notepad++ I can see fragmented text (plain) that tells what files I am sharing and such.

Not that I don't trust you Nir :) Just curious.

The data file does contain all of the client's information, including your login, password, folders and files you're sharing... I don't care about any of that, I'm really just interested in seeing which data groups take up the most memory. If you're worried about it being compromised during transit you can always put it in a truecrypt container and give me the password, the downside being that it won't be possible to compress... either way you have nothing to worry about.

thescarletfire's picture

Ok, I'll send you the dump file in a 7zip file, with password.

And to show you a typical screenshot, here is a Win8 x64 machine with 8GB RAM showing ~1GB of RAM being used by SS after just a few hours of being idle (no uploads/downloads at this time):

http://i6.minus.com/jbjFZtKn26s0AM.JPG

And here is SS after a few hours idle and then searching for one term:

http://i5.minus.com/jy5rARXY9SG97.JPG
(1100MB RAM usage, not responding)

It's not a Windows 8 thing either, because my Win7 x64 machine shows near identical readouts as well, just fyi.

Good luck.

And please let me know if/how my data dump can help you.