I wish in my case it was the tools just getting better, and me just suddenly realizing that from doing a major version upgrade, but I’ve always just stayed on the most recent weekly versions of the non LTS branches throughout the whole of my game’s 5 year production. The time ranges I gave above arn’t precise since all of my past memories of using the engine are a blur of the “most recent” builds. This problem in particular of excess “private ram” being allocated might have been happening a bit a year or so ago, but it’s been something within the past 6-8 months that it suddenly jumped from < 1 GB (max) (e.g., too small to notice) to 3+ GB (all of the time) in my case.
Overall 99.5% of time I could not be more happy with the really detailed reports I get from the default profiler. There are only two times I can remember total that I couldn’t immediately isolate my issue at hand through just using it. 1) Was in late 2020/early 2021 when Unity’s didn’t yet supporting SRP GPU profiling at the time (excluding ProfilerRecorders). That getting fixed on all platforms about a year later was such a major improvement that it stuck out like a red flag in snow in my mind. 2) Was just a really simple inability to query the current total available ram (to all apps on the whole OS system level) w/o using platform specific plugins, or system specific API calls to the OS directly. I wouldn’t even quality that as a real problem, just a very rarely needed unsupported feature.
This is the first time ever that I’ve had any problem with RAM reporting of any kind from within Unity, period. I could not be more happy with what you and the rest of the people in your department have provided us all in general =).
Admittedly the most complex profiling work I’ve needed to do RAM wise has mostly just detecting leaks in native allocations (for burst/the job system); and unity’s ability report down to the line number where all of those allocation are made makes those ram leaks really trivial to diagnose in editor.