[0.16.50] Crashing just before main menu

[Illiander42]

Game loaded fine yesterday. Haven't changed any settings since last good load.

OS is Gentoo Linux, Factorio is launched via Steam.

Game goes into loading screen (the black one with the Factorio logo and orange progress bar, "loading mods", "loading sprites", etc...)

At 80-90% the screen flashes grey, then crashes back to desktop. It should go through to the main menu (play, options, mods, etc...)

Restarting Steam and reducing my memory usage in other programs has been a viable workaround before, as has restarting my computer. This time it doesn't seem to. Might be coincidence, may just be an ~80% intermittent problem.

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Currently uploading my mods zipfile, but that'll take a few hours (slow upload + 785.7MB zipped)

Any other information that would be useful?


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Edit: Also, your forums have a bug, where if you try to upload a file that's too big, then you just keep getting "file too big" errors when you try to submit the post. Had to make a new "new Topic" tab, and copy over the text to work around that.

Edit2: My mod folder: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1g2ATC ... 2Z5-YM2WCL

[Illiander42]

And some more info from me having a poke around:

The crash is caused by my machine running out of RAM at the "Loading Sprites" stage where factorio uses all my processors (I have 16 logical processors, and only 16GB RAM, with a system resting RAM of about 4GB, so each thread is using ~0.75GB). There only seems to be the one place where factorio takes advantage of multiple processors in the loading screen, so that location should be easier to find.

After getting past that stage, memory usage goes down again, so it looks like it fires off too many threads, or the threads each use too much RAM, compared to what my machine has available.

A check to limit how many sprite loading threads are able to run simultaneously based on available memory, as well as available processors, would probably be the easiest fix for this. Or just catch that it's happening and add it to the log.

I guess this could be elevated to a bug report?

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I solved the issue for myself, by turning on my swap partition, which cranked me up to 32GB effective RAM, of which Factorio was using about 12-14.

Yeah, make a joke about Gentoo being hard to set up right, I've earned that one.

[Bilka]

You could also try turning off parallel sprite loading, you can find that somewhere in the config file. Afaik it's enabled if you have more than 12GB RAM. I turned it off because it would momentarily freeze my PC, so it could be what's crashing it for you.

[Illiander42]

Yep, turning off parallel sprite loading looks like it would also have fixed the issue. (Memory usage only increased, instead of spiking and dropping)

I kinda wish there was a way to say "only use X threads for sprite loading" though. I get that same system-wide freeze at 85%, and I probably wouldn't if I could tell Factorio to only use 8 or 12 threads.