Copyright (c) 2016 Gerry Iles (Padishar)
This started as a simple plugin that displays a graph of the Mono heap allocation rate and garbage collection, mainly intended as a troubleshooting and development aid rather than for general use. However, I have since devised a way to force Mono to keep significantly more free space in the heap, which can significantly reduce the frequency at which the heap fills up and the Mono garbage collection causes a stutter, so I have added it to this mod.
Copy the MemGraph folder from the zip file into the GameData folder of your KSP installation.
Mod-KeypadMultiply toggles the display of the window.
Mod-KeypadPlus increases the vertical scale of the graph.
Mod-KeypadMinus decreases the vertical scale of the graph.
Mod-KeypadDivide runs a bit of test code controlled by MemGraph\PluginData\test.cfg.
Mod-End pads the Mono heap with a configurable amount of headroom to reduce frequency of garbage collections.
Every second the plugin totals up all the memory allocated on the heap and whether any garbage collections have run. It also displays the current total heap allocation, the maximum heap allocation just before the last garbage collection, the minimum just after the last collection, the number of "render" and "physics" updates and the time between the previous two collections.
The graph is 600 pixels wide and shows the last 10 minutes of the memory allocation in green. If a garbage collection happens during the interval, that column of the graph will have a red background.
The test code basically allocates a number of blocks of the specified size and displays which allocations actually cause the allocated heap to change. This allows us to deduce various characteristics of the memory allocator and garbage collection mechanisms.
Mod-End activates the heap padding. The amount of padding is controlled by the MemGraph\PluginData\padheap.cfg. The format of the file is very simple. Each line controls the number of padding blocks allocated of each size. The first value is the size of each block allocated and the second is the number of blocks. The first values are only present for illustration, they don't actually control the size of the blocks, these are hardwired to the sizes in the default configuration. The default configuration allocates around 1024 MB of padding.
I recommend that you run the game normally and load up a situation that has noticeable stutter. Display the graph, setting the scale so the regular allocation rate fits nicely and the garbage collection red lines can be seen. Let it run for several runs of the garbage collector and then hit Mod-End. After a short pause, the game should continue with a considerably larger gap between the collections. After another few collections hit Mod-End again and it may improve further. I would appreciate feedback about how well this works, e.g. screenshots of the graph taken during this process and after another few collections would be very helpful along with details about your setup (and preferably, an output_log.txt/player.log file). Many thanks to Tig for the testing and very well presented data he provided.
One other thing I should add, though it should be obvious with only a little thought, is that the heap padding mechanism is only intended for 64 bit versions of the game. Trying to allocate 1024 MB of extra heap space on the 32 bit version is unlikely to be successful and, if it is, then it will probably cause the game to crash before long due to running out of address space. It is also unlikely to work effectively if your machine has only 4GB of RAM as the total usage of KSP is likely to grow close to 4GB even without loading a save, resulting in virtual memory paging which will seriously hurt performance.
The code is released under the MIT license (see https://github.com/Gerry1135/MemGraph/blob/master/Graph.cs).