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I'm developing a Flash game, and I can appreciate that the memory usage is a little high for a Flash game (I think). Let's say 100+ MB.

So how much is too much when talking about memory usage in Flash games?

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    \$\begingroup\$ Are you talking about memory requirements (RAM) or content size/bandwidth? \$\endgroup\$
    – bummzack
    Commented Mar 8, 2011 at 16:05
  • \$\begingroup\$ I suggest you change the title to reflect the actual question, i.e. "How much memory usage is too much?" \$\endgroup\$
    – Kzqai
    Commented Mar 8, 2011 at 16:26
  • \$\begingroup\$ Sory, my bad. Im talking about RAM memory usage. And, I think I cant change the title of the question. \$\endgroup\$
    – Artemix
    Commented Mar 8, 2011 at 17:42
  • \$\begingroup\$ I've clarified the title as part of an edit. \$\endgroup\$
    – Gregory Avery-Weir
    Commented Mar 8, 2011 at 17:52

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I've been wondering about this as well, so I decided to check out some popular games and watch Firefox's plugin container memory consumption.

Memory starts and defaults back to around 5-10MB on my setup. With that in mind, here are the peak memory usages in the first 3-5 minutes of gameplay for some popular games:

Notes:

Smeet is a Facebook Social Game, it ran at around 100 MB, and peaked at 200 when I entered an area with lots of characters and assets. Chibi Knight has fairly simple assets, but an extremely large multi-screen background image (non-tiled), which explains it's high memory usage. The two lowest memory games are both non-scrolling and single-screen (at least in the first couple minutes), explaining their low usage.

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According to your tags it says "browser-based-games" depending on the game and its complexity, I would say 100mb most likely too much, unless you are creating a large mmo style flash game(even that is very large!)

There is a bunch of compression options you have for flash as well, which may shrink your game down

tiny: 0 - 200 KB;

small: 200 - 700 KB

Medium: 800 - 1400 KB

Large: 1500 - 4000 KB

too Large: 4000 - 9000 KB

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I assumed content on disk/bandwidth-overall size of the project \$\endgroup\$
    – Spooks
    Commented Mar 8, 2011 at 16:14
  • \$\begingroup\$ Sory, I wasn't clear, I was talking about ram memory usage. \$\endgroup\$
    – Artemix
    Commented Mar 8, 2011 at 18:06
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The answer depends on your target audience. Do you want people to play your flash game on their Netbook and/or their flash supporting Playbook or Android tablet? If so, then memory usage over and beyond 50 MB is likely going to be an issue. If you only expect your game to be played on tricked out gaming rigs, then taking up 100-400 MB memory is likely not going to be a problem.

The issue, may be Flash's ability to address this much memory quickly. I'm not a flash developer so I don't really know, but if your game needs this much memory it probably has a lot of supporting code, which is where, even on "gods-own-machine," you may run into issues.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I assumed Memory requirements, not content on disk/bandwidth. \$\endgroup\$
    – Nate
    Commented Mar 8, 2011 at 16:06
  • \$\begingroup\$ I see. Anw, looking at "big" games at, for example, Kongregate.com, they all are above ~50 mbs. \$\endgroup\$
    – Artemix
    Commented Mar 8, 2011 at 17:43
  • \$\begingroup\$ If you're talking about MB, you shouldn't write mbs as it stands for something quite different. \$\endgroup\$
    – bummzack
    Commented Mar 8, 2011 at 20:14
  • \$\begingroup\$ Then, what means mbs? \$\endgroup\$
    – Artemix
    Commented Mar 9, 2011 at 14:26
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    \$\begingroup\$ I'm associating mbs with megabit per second, although you'd probably write it as mb/s or mbps. Usually a capital "B" stands for Byte, whereas a "b" stands for bit \$\endgroup\$
    – bummzack
    Commented Mar 9, 2011 at 15:31
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FWIW, I was helping out a family member complaining of a slow PC. She plays CafeWorld on facebook. Investigation lead to Firefox/the flash plugin taking up almost a gigabyte of memory usage. I thought this might have been a fluke, having experienced many browser-based memory leaks over the years, closed everything and tried it with another browser. I watched the memory usage as it slowly crawled back up to the 970~ mb mark as all the game's various assets loaded.

Absurd, but I'm sure you can point at the game and say it has millions of users. (yup, just checked, 14 million monthly users, blah)

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Wow... ~1GB... just.. wow. I guess then, ~150 is not that much. And, no, I dont have any leaks, already made my own garbage collector. \$\endgroup\$
    – Artemix
    Commented Mar 9, 2011 at 14:30
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I would differentiate between download size and memory size, some assets are large, other game related data structures bloat the client's memory but require little bandwidth to download.

That was the strategy behind FLV, to compress the video code for download, and then decompress it assuming fast CPU and lots of memory in the client.

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128 Megabytes is the Default maximum, so I would say above 128 Megabytes is too much.

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