Bad performance until minimizing the app

Unity Engine
,
1

We are having a weird issue with performance on WinPhone8(doesn’t happen on other platforms).

Our game suffers from really bad performances and spikey FPS when launching the application an initial launch(not from multitasking window), the game runs at 5-10 FPS on Lumia 520. The strange thing is that the performance issues are completely gone after minimizing the app and restoring it again through multitasking window.

After running the profiler it seems that about 90% of CPU usage is dedicated to “Overhead” and this decreases after minimizing the app.

I was wondering if someone have encountered a similar issue and if there is a way fix that.

Thanks!

2

That’s strange. What about memory usage before/after minimizing?

3

The memory usage looks the same.

I am attaching Profiler screenshots of initial run and after minimizing (same point in game):

1433838--76439--$WP8_profiler_initialrun_cpu.PNG
1433838--76439--$WP8_profiler_initialrun_cpu.PNG1567×989 150 KB

1433838--76440--$WP8_profiler_resume_cpu.PNG
1433838--76440--$WP8_profiler_resume_cpu.PNG1573×1004 171 KB

1433838--76441--$WP8_profiler_initialrun_memory.PNG
1433838--76441--$WP8_profiler_initialrun_memory.PNG1560×989 120 KB

1433838--76442--$WP8_profiler_resume_memory.PNG
1433838--76442--$WP8_profiler_resume_memory.PNG1566×991 134 KB

4

I wouldn’t say it’s the same :). Before minimizing you have 6 MB of RAM to spare before OS kills your app, whilst after - 24 MB.

Could you try calling GC.Collect() just as you load up your game?

5

Sorry missed that ):

Anyway I’ve tried using GC.Collect() and and Resources.UnloadUnusedAssets

It didn’t help at all.

6

If app is not launching on Win8 there can be 3 or 4 problems:
The device is not upto date
may be app is blocked by Firewall
Sync App Licences

7

Are you by any chance creating some textures or meshes programmatically before minimizing the app? Or some other graphics resources?

Also, which Unity version are you using?

8

I am attaching textures to materials programatically upon application startup (low texture->low memory devices/high texture->high end devices).
The materials are deployed without any textures on them.

I am using Unity 4.2.2

Thanks!

9

Well, on Windows Phone 8 it looks like this - when you minimize an app, Windows OS destroys all the graphics context you may have, and when you resume the app, assets that are used are reloaded by Unity.

My wild guess is that somewhere is your code you have created some objects that aren’t actually used in the scene, and therefore when you minimize the app, it gets destroyed, and when you get back to it, they don’t get recreated because they aren’t used anywhere. That would explain why this is happening.

I suggest you try updating to Unity 4.3 and backup your project in case you want to come back for some reason. There were multiple fixes in it which may have fixed this as well if it’s a bug indeed.

10

I have the same problem, and I noticed that as it is plugged into Visual Studio game runs smoothly. I’m using version 4.3 and tested for Lumi 520. Any idea what it could be?

11

It seems that there is about 20 MB of memory allocated (not from our code) and its beind released upon returning from minimize.
Unfortunately we didn’t find a proper solution so we reduced the app memory usage by 20 MB(texture compression, streaming sounds).