Although the 1.61 patch reduced memory leaks, I believe there are still some areas of memory management that need to be addressed in the future. My observation, which I believe holds for most users, is that the application will encounter saving errors after allocating 1.5 GB of memory (whether or not it is cached). Shortly after this, a crash normally follows (for obvious reasons).

I believe the cause of this problem is that the program is designed to cache a large amount of data to increase speed. For instance, ship models/textures, generation of terrain maps, etc. Even with all graphics options turned off and 0% surface variety, a developed maximum-sized galaxy can load in excess of 1.1 GB.

However, at least half of what is loaded is used rarely or not at all (as indicated by physical memory swapped in after minimizing and restoring the window and playing some turns). Therefore, a possible solution to these memory allocation problems is to provide a performance option to unload resources which are not used often or have not been accessed in some time, or to load some things on-demand (which will not create a noticable lag on a fast system). That takes care of the "static" portion of memory usage.

During play, memory is allocated over time. I don't think the game objects or AIs require that much, so I assume it is preloading additional textures/models (or it is a memory leak). If I am simply moving ships around and attacking (instant combat, no graphics) and doing colony management, the memory increase is relatively slow. However, as soon as I start mass invading, memory usage increases dramatically until I am forced to restart the application. This makes me think that the ground combat background (which varies) or the unit/terrain models are not being unloaded properly.

The solution to this problem (if there are no memory leaks) is to load these resources when they are needed for combat, then unload them when combat is complete. The same applies for planet/terrain graphics. Since I am running without textures, there is no other reason for the increased memory consumption. Making this feature a user-selected option allows people playing smaller maps where the problem doesn't occur to fully cache the resources for speed; users who encounter these problems due to the resource requirements of a large map can use the "smart-cache" option to conserve memory while taking a slight performance hit. Only the core map/colony/AI data and textures/models used in the galaxy map should be cached, as these are used continually.