Why does KSP break when you leave the game alone for too long?

[RYU AZUKU99]

Just a question for anyone who knows the answer. 

Why does KSP break when you leave the game open without doing anything for too long? I've had the game become unresponsive(to my clicks and button presses, but will still be running) multiple times because of leaving to eat dinner or mow the lawn and I just would like to know what the cause is.

[Kerbart]

Memory leaks, probably. A process within KSP (maybe stock, maybe a mod) may need 1 MB of memory, and for reasons returns only 995k of that. And say this gets called 5 times per second. That's 25k per second which may not look like a lot but give it time and it will run your system out of memory.

Another suspect is your screen saver which really doesn't like KSP. Or Windows going into energy saving mode and turning the screen off. It doesn't seem to like that either.

And I'm sure there's more, but this is what I quickly could think of.

Edited August 21, 2017 by Kerbart

[Fearless Son]

I could not tell you why KSP specifically breaks, but I know of some processes that, if left to run long enough, have some really weird effects.

For example, I once wrote a clone of Asteroids for a college project, with polygonal asteroids with procedural randomized rough edges that spin around at a random angular velocity.  I left the game running without collision detection on Friday, came back to my class computer on Monday.  All the asteroids had changed sizes, some getting really small, others getting really large.  Turns out that small rounding errors in the floating point calculations for the asteroid vertexes caused the vertexes to either get further apart or further together, depending on the spin direction, and that those errors, while tiny, were cumulative and built up over long periods of time.  

Edited August 21, 2017 by Fearless Son

[MR L A]

41 minutes ago, Fearless Son said:

I could not tell you why KSP specifically breaks, but I know of some processes that, if left to run long enough, have some really weird effects.

For example, I once wrote a clone of Asteroids for a college project, with polygonal asteroids with procedural randomized rough edges that spin around at a random angular velocity.  I left the game running without collision detection on Friday, came back to my class computer on Monday.  All the asteroids had changed sizes, some getting really small, others getting really large.  Turns out that small rounding errors in the floating point calculations for the asteroid vertexes caused the vertexes to either get further apart or further together, depending on the spin direction, and that those errors, while tiny, were cumulative and built up over long periods of time.  

Know what round-ish things Squad had issues with because of floating point errors? Orbits! They would decay, hence the setting for "orbit decay compensation"  Sort of wish Orbits had realistic decay... then again there's a lot id like to do with KSP lol