Frequent crashes during modded KSP startup

[SpaceHungryMan]

KSP: 0.90 Ubuntu 64bit

PROBLEM: Frequent crashes to desktop. Occurs mostly during startup but also occasionally in the VAB or flight scenes. Reported as "Aborted (core dumped)" in the terminal.

LOGS: KSP.log | Player.log (These particular logs are from my most recent crash which was from the VAB instead of startup as usually happens)

MODS: Mod List | Picture of mod folder

GENERAL SYSTEM SPECS: i7-4790K OC (4.6GHz @ 1.175v), 32GB DDR3-1866 RAM, GTX 780

First of all, I do not have this problem with a stock-only install which makes me think it's a mod issue. That being said, I cannot isolate the problem to one specific mod or even one group of mods. As far as I can tell, they all work fine with one another. When it's not crashing, everything works smoothly. Good framerate, no signs of odd effects or glitchiness.

The crashes only seem to occur when I'm using more than 7.5-ish GB of RAM. By that, I mean that I can go into my folder and randomly prune mods until it respects that limit and then all of a sudden the crashes stop happening. I'd prefer not to use this solution if possible because I enjoy having lots of mods and consider most of the ones I have necessary. I was also given to understand that KSP on Linux 64bit has no "hard" RAM limit so what gives?

Here are the things I've tried:

• Ensured all mods are up-to-date
  
• Ensured all mods are correctly installed
  
• Verified integrity of game cache on Steam
  
• Deleted everything, reinstalled KSP, and reinstalled all my mods (this was a few weeks ago and I'd hate to try it again since it didn't work the first time)
  
• Tried with and without the segfault fix by Addle over in The Linux Thread
  
• tried with and without the quad-core startup script provided in The Other Linux Thread
  
• Reduced swappiness
  
• Disabled swappiness
  

I would appreciate any insight. Please let me know if you need anything else.

Thanks!

[kiko1004]

Up to this thread, I have exactly the same problem 😥 Hope someone can help . My KSP 64 crashes always with a high memory usage on ubuntu. ( I also have 32 gb ram)

[UnanimousCoward]

Same issue for me. Ubuntu, with 16 Gb Ram, and my current install uses about 7.1 Gb of RAM sitting at the main menu. It's an odd one, though: seems to me that it will crash around 80% of the time when I first start it up, but it will load just fine on the second try around 80% of the time.

One thing I've noticed from sifting through the logs is that there's usually an error about "trying to access memoryaddresses at more that 16 Gb RAM" or similar (don't remember the precise wording, but I remember the typo of "than"). As the KSP process is using 7 Gb, it could be that there's a memory leak somewhere.

The crash seems to happen just as the main menu is loading, and I've noticed that the memory error message very often comes directly after some entries in the log about resizing the desktop. Not always, though, and it may be coincidental. There's also sometimes (but not always) error messages after it crashes at the start of the log related to the LD_PRELOAD part of my launch script. They're generally not there when it's loaded OK without crashing.

It's annoying to have to start multiple times, but once the game's going it's more stable and runs better for me than it ever did in Windows. Plus I can use all the mods I want without having to compromise, so I've learned to live with it. Would be nice to find a fix, though.

[SpaceHungryMan]

Hello fellow sufferers,

After doing some more research, it turns out Linux 64-bit doesn't necessarily mean that you get a free pass on RAM usage. Certain "sectors" of KSP still have a hard RAM limit of about 4GB.

That means it's still necessary to keep an eye on mod usage (just not as much as with Windows). Personally, I use ATM and Procedural Parts and have pruned a lot of redundant parts from my install. The crashes still occur but are now much less frequent.

[Tellion]

Same issue here, it seems the linux version of KSP 64bit suffers from the same unity disease that the windows version does, albeit much less severely so.

[UnanimousCoward]

Well for me, at least, the crashes only seem to occur on startup. Gameplay itself seems completely stable. It's annoying, but I can live with it - and occasionally there's little burst of pleasure when it actually manges to start up on the first try...

[SpaceHungryMan]

Yeah I suspect my in-game crashes were a result of mod incompatibilities and such. I cleaned everything up since then and they haven't happened yet.

[Svm420]

I have the same issue. Really hope Unity 5 will bring true 64 bit stability with unlimited ram usage.

[YellowApple]

If anyone's still following this, the 16GB hard limit bug ("Using memoryadresses from more that 16GB of memory" [sic]) has been reported to Squad, and (based on my own experimentation) is a Unity 4 bug, rather than KSP-specific (also affects other Unity 4 games, like Cities: Skylines). I've also opened up an inquiry on Unity3D question/answer site for further details on that particular message specifically. Hopefully such artificial RAM limits will go away once we get Unity 5 (though given the multiple spelling errors, I suspect this might be some very dusty corner of Unity's codebase that might not have been adequately tested or identified...).

 

EDIT: given that Cities: Skylines has since (or maybe it was all along) moved to Unity 5, and given that Cities: Skylines continues to have the same exact error (complete with the same exact poorly-spelled error message), it's doubtful that KSP 1.1 will solve this issue.

Edited March 2, 2016 by YellowApple