I play on a Mac and I recently upgraded my RAM to the maximum, 32gb, because I noticed HotS will continue to eat up insane amounts of memory the longer I play. After 7-8 games we’re talking 10gb of memory. Eventually this leads to performance degradation even on my setup of 32gb, and the only solution is restarting the client. I guess restarting every so often isn’t such a big deal, but why is the game taking up so much RAM…
Probably a MEMORY LEAAAAAKKK
Hey, LyrasVulture! Moved this over to the Mac Support forums. We’ve seen some third party programs interact with the game improperly at times, such as Discord in the past. Have you tried disabling the login items to test?
If it continues, what MacOS version are you currently on? Was an Apple Diagnostic scan run as well?
I’m not running any other programs while paying HotS (no login items for my account), and my Apple Diagnostic Scan comes up fine. And I’m on the latest version of Catalina.
For some stats, I’ve been playing HotS for about 5 hours, and the RAM usage is now 8.81GB.
Thanks for the details, LyrasVulture! We are not aware of any issues that should be causing this sort of high usage, but I will keep a watchful eye on any new reports or findings from our team. For now, could you provide SPX files to techinfo@blizzard.com? Use the subject, ATTN: Caterpepi - Heroes RAM Usage [38036].
This inbox is not monitored and will not send responses. It’s used to collect information for Technical Support to assist in troubleshooting.
Sent. Thank you for being so responsive.
Got it, LyrasVulture! I’m still looking through this it all and noting a few things here. Have you also been experiencing crashes when it reaches a certain amount? Based on the logs, it looks like somethings are crashing. Though I’m not exactly sure what is crashing just yet.
It’s a bit odd that the Address book is near the Heroes logs too. I’m wondering if this may be related to iCloud since there’s been some reports where the RAM usage was high and re-syncing the address book helped in a few situations. Some other services was called, but this was the primary outlier that I noticed within the logs for now.
I’ll dig through more to see what else I could find and let you know 
In the mean time, to the same address and the same subject, could you take a screenshot of the Memory window to check out?
Sent. I will turn iCloud off and see if that makes a difference.
I only had one instance where the performance was so degraded that I had to do a force quit. Other than that, no crashes.
Thank you, LyrasVulture! Received the screenshot Any luck with turning off iCloud temporarily?
I’m wondering if there may be some issues with caching causing the RAM usage to spike up quite high. Does it ever go much over 10GB of RAM after hours of play? I’ll try some testing on my side over the next few days to see if we can replicate this problem and get the right team to look into it if we can replicate the issue. I’ll follow up if I find anything new within the files you provided.
If anyone else running into this issue, please report the issue here! Feel free to provide the requested details above as well. More reports will help with tracking the problem and gathering information, if we’re seeing this problem with certain operating systems.
No, disabling icloud hasn’t made a difference. I haven’t been able to see if it goes above 10GB of RAM since I reset the game client when it gets that high. I will try to go above that tomorrow and see what happens. I know that it goes up by some amount after every game I play (just idling outside of a game doesn’t increase the RAM), so caching some game-related data probably has something to do with it. But you would think at some point it wouldn’t have any more stuff to cache…
Update:
I managed to get up to 12GB before needing to sign off for the day. I think it’s just gonna keep going up forever.
Heya LyrasVulture,
I actually spoke on this a while ago in the Windows forums with a previous poster. The first question to ask yourself is “Are you getting poor performance or other concerning behavior at high RAM usage?” If not, simply having high RAM usage is not a problem of itself. More on that here.
TL;DR of that thread is that while you play, we’re caching a bunch of data - skins, map textures, etc. Each thing cached speeds up the load of your future matches. This is useful for people who play for extended periods of time as the load performance should improve the longer you play, especially if you’re playing on the same maps or with the same heroes.
Once you restart the game, you’re clearing that cache and we rebuild it the next time you play, so if you find that you’re getting degraded performance at high ram usage you can always do so. Beyond that, you’d be getting into suggestion turf and would want to hit up the General Discussion boards.
Hi Drak,
I understand that, and if it was just 5GB I wouldn’t complain, but we’re talking as high as 12GB, and it’s seemingly never ending. Usually by the time I’m at 10-12GB I’m done for the day, but if I ever played more eventually I’m going to run out of memory. It just seems bizarre that HotS would be cacheing so much stuff after every game, indefinitely.
How high are your in game settings? The higher quality you play at, the larger the file cache size is going to be.
Also, keep in mind that that thread was 2 years ago and there’s quite a bit more in game since then. Since I’m not a dev I can’t speak to why the cache doesn’t empty itself more quickly, but until you hit the cap on your RAM (which is unlikely even if you were to cache every texture in the game) you shouldn’t experience any meaningful performance degradation. As an experiment, you can just keep playing the game for a while after that and you should see the usage continue to increase, but do so more slowly over time as you cache more files.
Your Random Access Memory is here for just such a purpose - to be accessed at random to pull out information that you may need for applications you’re using. If the only behavior you’re seeing is high RAM usage, we can’t really help here since that’s working as intended after some time playing.
I’m only on medium settings. When I tried high settings (which is what the game recommends), I eventually got a strange pseudo crash where the screen flashed black, the terrain started looking weird, and I couldn’t see much or do anything. I had to do a force quit at that point. At the time I thought it must have used too much memory and just couldn’t function anymore, so I went down to medium settings.
In any event, you’re probably right that this is just the game cacheing stuff, and the growth would eventually taper off. In general, my performance on medium settings is very good, and I only have very occasional stuttering, which I attribute to being on wifi instead of a wired connection.
That makes sense with the way the heroes engine works, since it’s borrowed from Starcraft II where performance can be impacted by hiccups. There ARE terrain issues on Catalina which are likely unrelated to the RAM issue - that’s one of the things we’re investigating which is related to the crashes in that other thread you’re posting in.