How big is your main game save? The information is for a bug report I am doing.

[Anth]

I am close to finished on a bug report that is related to game save files.

Larger Game Saves are causing memory leaks and longer and longer load times.

But if most peoples game saves are small, then the bug report probably isn't worth it.

So I am asking for honest answers to the sizes of game saves.

[archiebald]

My main career is just on year 2 day 40, large bases on Mun and Minmus, probes out to Duna, Eve, Dres and now planning kerballed missions to Duna & Dres, 36 Kerbals and about 50 current flights.  I have 73 mods currently installed giving me 10,400KB.

You really should ask people to summarize the career length related to the save game size.

I'm no expert, but the longer loading times are most likely associated with length of career (number of kerbals and current flights), plus number of mods installed - both of which seem very natural to me.

[Mazlem]

My save was started in 2016 and I'm on year 10 with 51 flights in progress.  I used to have some visual mods; currently just KER / KAS.

Some historical file sizes:

Persistent - 4/20/2020 - 21MB
Quicksave 6 - 1/16/2020 - 18MB
Quicksave 4 - 6/9/2019 - 15MB
Quicksave 1 - 5/19/2018 - 9MB
Persistent from backup 4 - 4/26/2018 - 9MB

[Anth]

Not entirely sure that the length of a career causes issues except for the fact that if careers were done over a few years that the file would have ended up so big because of the players commitment to that save

[Anth]

Thanks for the people who have contributed to the poll, more would help though

[swjr-swis]

On 4/22/2020 at 7:56 AM, Anth12 said:

So I am asking for honest answers to the sizes of game saves.

I no longer have all my long-going saves on my disk, but going on what I have now and what I remember having seen before, the persistent.sfs sizes have been anywhere between a few KB to a bit over 100 MB.

Remember that the persistent.sfs keeps a record of every craft currently 'flying' in the save, including all parts and part modules that mods may add. I think persistent file size is much more influenced by how large (in terms of parts) your loaded craft are, and if you're a mod user, how many mods you are using and how many part modules those add to your craft.

I have saves that have been going for years that are still under 5MB in size, while I've seen freshly started saves that immediately ballooned to 20+MB due to just parking a set of huge 1500+ part stations in LKO.

So you might need a bit more information than just the size of the sfs file, if you want to be able to compare things or meaningfully search for root causes.

[Anth]

@swjr-swis

A Twitch streamer called @I2ocketGuy is maxing out his 16GB of ram within hours. His load times get longer and longer. KSP starts having performance issues when Windows 10 cant give him any more ram than it is currently using. (Haven't seen the garbage collection stuttering the game...maybe that's fixed)

First time I saw this was @EJ_SA whose on twitch in the 1.2 prerelease with a save that he used for hours and hours which had a good number of crafts. He hasn't used that save for a while so I haven't seen it happen to him recently

https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/21234

I reported the above bug that related to the amount of objects within KSP which I thought Squad had fixed (because I tested it) and I had set it to resolved only to see i2ocketguy's issues which weren't exactly the same but similar. 

The bug report has 216 accurate times from 1.4.5, 1.5.1, 1.6.1 (log files) to show that if the tracking station icons were on for 1.6.1 that the load time was 4 minutes 48 seconds if there were 500 (small in this case) objects which only added up to 3258kb.

The testing showed curves on a graph that ranged from 0 to 500 parts to show the problem.

Then this problem shows up for i2ocketguy and I think...damn. Maybe the bug is still happening and I didn't test it properly before resolving it, but I remember the improvements in the testing. The bug was definitely resolved. Over 4 minutes down to 11 seconds if I remember it right.

Current Bug Testing

It takes me a while to formulate the right way to report a bug. Weeks if not months depending on the complexity of the bug. 

This bug ended up being that I needed to do basic actions using a big game save, and a small game save and a medium game save.

Versions tested 1.1.3, 1.2.2, 1.9.1, 1.9.1 DLCs, 1.9.1 DLCs with minor mods, 1.9.1 tested on older computer (i7 4770K using cpus graphics at lowest settings)

Group of tests recorded 24.

I would do a scene change/save/action and record the current ram usage for KSP after it settles on what the ram wants to be...I do this by hand from the task manager on the other monitor

I currently have recorded 1248 ram usage numbers and entered them into an excel sheet.

There are 54 or 55 actions that involve actions, tracking station, KSC, VAB, SPH Loading crafts

I have 2 crafts for the testing that are 8 parts and 21 parts. Each test takes 45 minutes to 1 hour to do. If I fail to do a test correctly most of the time I have to restart from scratch.

 

Elimination of outside causes:

Test uses 1 game save and uses the same crafts. Each game save/crafts are upgraded to the version they are to be tested on first (KSP converting game saves also causes memory issues the first time)

Used Crafts are small 8 parts + 21 parts to eliminate large crafts being the issue.

No creation of crafts to eliminate that being the cause

Minimal amount of crafts in the editor (VAB/SPH) to eliminate the amount of crafts in the load screen being the cause.

Questions?

I'm open to input if you think in this case I haven't nailed down 1 root cause for the memory issues, or I missing something important.

 

[magnemoe]

Mine is 29.4 MB, its an 20 second delay on craft switching. 
Note to self move KSP onto the SSD, then buy an second SSD.
Get some weird stuff from time to time but overall game works. 

[Anth]

29.4 wow.

Not entirely sure how much if an ssd improves the load times between scenes. 

Interesting. going to have to test that....cool

[Anth]

Thanks everyone who contributed to this poll

[Anth]

More people using 1001 - 5000. interesting