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Multi-client advice needed
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Christa Larne
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#1 - 2012-04-16 06:41:08 UTC
I have a 2011 Macbook Pro (OS X 10.6.8, 2.66 GHz i7, 4GB RAM) on which I play Eve. I regularly run two clients using the onboard screen and an external 22" monitor. I have three accounts but if I try to run three instances of Eve I pretty much immediately get lock up of at least one client (client freezes completely and has to be force quit) sometimes more and occasionally the whole machine locks up and has to be hard reset (hold down power button). It is completely consistent, I cannot run 3 clients for longer than a couple of minutes whereas I regularly run 2 clients for hours.

I use the 'master' client and two copies made using Eve Clonemaker.

Does anyone have any advice on what might be causing this and whether there is any way to fix it?

Thanks.
Vincent Athena
Photosynth
#2 - 2012-04-16 12:42:20 UTC  |  Edited by: Vincent Athena
I can run 3 with no issue on my MBP. The only differences I see are I use just the built in screen and I got 8 gig memory. Maybe you need more memory?

Edit: Plugged a extra screen into my MBP, ran 3 accounts at once: no crash or lockup (30 minute test).

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Christa Larne
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#3 - 2012-04-17 06:53:35 UTC
I think you're right. I used atMonitor to check and with two clients running memory utilisation is already up around 85-90%. Run the third client and it hits 99% and stays there. I guess there is an additional memory overhead running Eve on the Mac as I have run 3 clients on a Windows PC with 4 GB RAM before.

While it's an annoying answer at least I know now what the problem is. Just have to work out whether to fix it or run my second Mac for additional clients.
Vincent Athena
Photosynth
#4 - 2012-04-17 15:23:23 UTC
Interesting. I wonder how many other people getting client freeze issues are running out of memory, either because they do not have enough, or its being used up by other stuff they have running at the same time as Eve.

What this means is the eve client is not playing nice and doing proper memory management. The Mac client is bigger than the PC client because the Mac client IS the PC client running under a basic PC emulator, called Cider. Cider uses extra memory. My guess is its Cider thats messing up the memory management. What should be happening is when you run 3 clients with too little memory is the performance goes way down, but the clients would still run.

CCP: this may be a way for you to reproduce this bug. Run the client on a Mac where the memory is all being used by other apps.

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Christa Larne
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#5 - 2012-04-17 21:30:24 UTC
I do tend to shut everything else down but I have noticed something interesting since I have started running atMonitor. When I first run up a client it will indicate around 45% of my memory is in use. But, after the client has been running for a while (let's say 10 minutes - I haven't timed it) the memory utilisation jumps to 75% and stays there. However, after quite some time it will drop back down to 45%, and then later on go back up to 75%.

That's with just one client running. Of further interest is the fact that running a second client only increases these figures by 10-15% rather than doubling the utilisation.

I realise this is hardly solid data but it does look like something odd is going on with the client using double the memory for periods of time. I suppose it is possible that it's something the OS is doing but as I said, I have closed everything obvious down.

For reference I have tried this on both my Macbook Pro and my Mac Mini, both of which are running OS X 10.7.3 and I am getting the same curious memory behaviour on both machines.
Christa Larne
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#6 - 2012-04-20 06:44:22 UTC
Update: upgraded the Macbook Pro to 8GB RAM and now it runs 3 clients comfortably. Have another issue with the clients but will post on that in a separate thread. But definitely clear that 4GB will only support 2 concurrent clients.