Guideline for Memory Usage

Unity Engine
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1

Is there a rough guideline for app memory usage? I haven’t found one. Would 30 megabytes be too high? How about 35?

Thanks,
-Jon

2

The Apple evangelists that went around the world to talk about the SDK told that an app should not go above 25 megs to be safe and run on all devices.

Best
Martin :slight_smile:

3

Yikes, that’s really rough, considering a blank Unity project running with all the strippins’ is about 18 megabytes. And then adding a spinning cube with a 512x512 pvrtc 4 bpp texture eats up another megabyte about.

Thanks,
-Jon

4

Are you talking RAM or app size? You shouldn’t go over 24 mb of RAM, there’s no restriction on app size that I know (except the HD space of the device itself).

5

RAM.

So does anyone have a non-trivial Unity iPhone app actually meeting this guideline?

Cheers,
-Jon

6

Keep in mind that the entire app isn’t loaded when the game runs - just the components it needs for the current scene. You could have a game that is up to 2GB (the App store limit) and as long as you don’t have more data loaded than you have memory, you’re cool as a cucumber.

BTW, I was initially under the same impression that the ceiling was 24MB, but then I saw some others talking on here that 24MB was the texture memory (including frame buffer) cap, but that you could go beyond that with other types of data (I think they said the cap for other data was something like 60 or 80MB). I’m not sure though.

7

Well, the 25 meg limiti is what Apple says is safe for your app to make sure it runs always. I’ve been going over the 25 megs with BubbleBang and got message from lots of customers that it doesn’t start up. Told the customers then to restart the phone so that they have then enough memory free and for most it worked. But as said, 25 is only what Apple recommands to be on the safe side.

8

I have Circuit Defenders working quite nicely on my iPhone. Not ready for release yet, but no memory issues. Thats with music, sfx and lots of models and textures.

9

It would be so much simpler if apple cleaned their broken “sandbox” so it removes app memory when the app is stopped. Can’t be that the last app is kept in RAM, just because apple is incapable to reserve space for an “application page file” to store application states or whatever they store in RAM that trashes your iphone that completely …
With 2.2 and the 3 pages of games, the problem got pretty large on my iphone.

10

I am looking at the Activity Monitor and Leaks instruments and my game (prototype actually) is growing and is almost at the significant 25MB level. Not sure about the all info Leaks is showing me it’s pretty low level.

Question about scripting in Unity: Assuming that I call Destroy() on GO’s that I am finished with, and I sometimes call Application.GarbageCollectUnusedAssets() , then is there any possible way I can cause memory leaks from my javascript code?

I understand there might be some leaks in PhysX or heck maybe even the SDK has some leaks, but just want to make sure I am not making dumb mistakes in my code. TIA!