Need help! Understanding memory and how it relates to the game.

[sweetdeda]

Over the past several weeks playing the game has become extremely frustrating for me, because of all the crashing. I have the same game on both my iPad and phone. I have noticed that the game is somewhat, not much, but somewhat more stable on my phone. I can actually mine with less chances of crashing on my phone than my iPad. Constantly being told that this is a memory issue is extremely frustrating for me as I am not a techie at all. I have also been told that this could be because of wifi issues, so please note that I have the same issue with both devices if they are on my home wifi, air card or even work wifi. I looked at my storage on both devices and now am more confused as it appears the game uses more memory on my phone than iPad yet seems to be more stable. Why would the same game require more memory on one device than the other?
I took 3 pictures to show this and in hopes someone can help me understand. The first 2 pics are from my phone and the 3rd my iPad. Am I wrong in thinking if this is a memory issue my iPad should be more stable than my phone?? Please help me understand. 235442354423545
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Any info to help me understand will be greatly appreciated

[sweetdeda]

Sorry not sure why the first pic appears twice or why my second phone pic appears last, just evidence that I am not a techie I guess. Lol

[Hawksmoor]

It's true, I've never had a storage issue on my phone but always get the messages on my iPad. I'm thinking my phone has more storage and doesn't take as much to run as the iPad.

[Hawksmoor]

Also, your phone may show it uses more memory on your phone if you have more animals/animations on that version.

[sweetdeda]

It's true, I've never had a storage issue on my phone but always get the messages on my iPad. I'm thinking my phone has more storage and doesn't take as much to run as the iPad.

It's the same forest on both devices, that's what really confuses me. I could probably delete some pics off my phone if I needed to, but I would much rather figure out how to stabilize the game on my iPad. The majority of what I use my iPad for is this game, yet as of lately I can rarely even harvest food on my iPad without it crashing.

[sweetdeda]

So you get an actually memory issue message? Because I never have, on either device, just crashes which support and other members keep contributing to a memory issue.

[Hawksmoor]

So you get an actually memory issue message? Because I never have, on either device, just crashes which support and other members keep contributing to a memory issue.

I have, and deleted a bunch of apps but still had crashes too, especially in the mine. Although since the last game update from the App Store around a week ago, my game seems more stable?

[55lee55]

I rarely crash on my iPad retina, but my iPad mini has just be*** crashing every time I try to access this game. Done the force close and shut down several times, and haven't added anything to the mini recently. Can this be fixed? Thanks.

[ogreve]

I looked at my storage on both devices and now am more confused as it appears the game uses more memory on my phone than iPad yet seems to be more stable. Why would the same game require more memory on one device than the other?
I took 3 pictures to show this and in hopes someone can help me understand. The first 2 pics are from my phone and the 3rd my iPad. Am I wrong in thinking if this is a memory issue my iPad should be more stable than my phone?? Please help me understand.

Hi,
O.k., here's an answer from someone who IS a techie, and I'll help you understand -- at least: that's the intention. ;)
Firstly: in light of the screenshots you added, I fear you're confusing two things (due to your non-techie background): storage space consumption and memory usage. I'll explain the differences:

-Storage space: your devices have a specific amount of "permanent" (let's call it like that to simplify matters) storage space, which in desk top computers would typically be the equivalent of hard disk or SSD storage. In your iPhone and iPad it is made of some kind of so-called "non-volatile memory", which tends to use the same kind of media as SSD drives or flash memory cards that are present in digital cameras. This is where the devices store the data that is to be kept present at all times, including when the device is fully powered off. The amounts of storage space are normally amounts that are GBs in multiples of powers of 2 (the reason for this is that data is stored in binary format, but that's not relevant here). The smallest amount of storage space that IOS devices have is 8GB, but depending on the device you'll often see 16GB, 64GB and also some 128GB devices.

-Memory: the device's "volatile memory" is a different matter. Devices like these cannot (or technically better put: do not) work with the above mentioned storage space alone. Faster volatile memory that is designed to be constantly read from and written to at high speed is used for the programs you have "actively" open at any time. This type of memory does not retain it's "state" (i.e. the contents) when the device is powered off. Also, this kind of memory is MUCH faster and more expensive than the above mentioned 'permanent' storage space. Therefore, the amount of 'memory' that these devices have is significantly smaller than the "storage space". I had one quick check for you and the specs of an iPhone 4s state that it uses 512MB of such memory and the iPhone 6 has 1 GB (I didn't check it for the various iPad models).

So, that's basically the difference between the two.
Now, when you do not open a program (app), it's simply present only in the "storage" and not in the "memory". However, when you do open a program, your device loads all or a part of it into memory. This is partly a performance optimisation measure (as anything in memory can be addressed FAR faster than anything in storage) but also often your device's hardware architecture will require you to have a part of the program in memory. I've never particularly studied the hardware of iPhones or iPads, so I can't tell what is exactly loaded (and kept) into memory when a program opens.

Well then, assuming that FFS has not already been opened, if you click on your FFS icon, you will see that the app is "loading". Well, much of that "loading" process means that data from the storage is read into memory and readied so your device can have the access to it that it requires. As mentioned by someone else above: the more stuff you have in your forest, the longer it takes to do so, as.... all of it occupies memory space. As you noticed, your storage usage of FFS is above 1GB, which is more than what the quoted iPhones have as memory. This is where the key of the issues lies: obviously FFS is quite "memory intensive" by which I mean that it needs to load a lot of data into memory in order to show everything. With each habitat and/or animal, the required amount increases. Hence, all of the "items" in your forest consume some memory and it all adds up. Now, often you'll also have opened other apps that are still kept in memory. There comes a moment when it becomes too much for your device, and when its memory starts getting full. At that point in time it depends how the device deals with that. One way is to use "storage" space for "swapping" out memory content. This is what can make devices like these as well as computers sometimes terribly slow. Another way of dealing with it is that the OS simply doesn't allow you to load more programs until others have been fully closed, and yet another way could be to not explicitly deal with it, and have the device crash when your apps are arm struggling over available memory resources. That final scenario would be evidence of a poor OS design, and I'm quite sure such is not the case on these devices. Nonetheless, proper memory management is not always easy, and it can be intensive on your OS, which in turn puts more strain on your device. Now, on newer devices, the hardware will be more powerful (faster processors (= CPUs), bigger and faster memory and bigger and faster storage). All of that helps the device being more capable to deal with this. If, however, you try to load a LOT of data into a relatively small memory size and you do so on a somewhat older device, with CPUs that are starting to get a bit dated AND if you also ask of your device that it animates ALL of it, you're gradually being set up for disaster. There comes a point where your device simply can't deal with it all anymore. And that's when you experience crashes etc.

So, is it JUST the memory usage alone?
Well, sometimes yes, but often it is compounded by other matters such as the performance of your CPU and the amount of available storage space for swapping. If your memory is getting full, and there's no storage space left to swap contents too, you're likely to experience crashes or half of your game not loading into memory and hence not showing. My wife has an 8GB iPhone 5c and that phone is only at level 21 and has a fraction of what my main forest has, but as the storage on that phone is always filled to the (almost) the maximum, FFS runs terribly on it and you often are looking at a forest that only shows the shadows of the animals and that is very sluggish in responding. These are tell-tale signs of performance issues in computer science land.

Now, the screenshots you added only give an insight into your storage space. On one device it says that 8.7GB is available, and I don't recall the amount from the other device. Now, unless your devices are very close to having NO storage space available, this is NOT the bottleneck on your device(s), as that is plenty of storage space to swap out to. What is far more likely, is that the amount of memory that is required to show your complete forest with all animals and animations etc. pushes your device right to the max (and then some...) and causes the crashes.

I always see people wonder why TL is being silent on this and why further expansions are being held at bay. They're not telling this much, but I can assure you that it's far from trivial to properly solve such performance issues. This often is the "price" that's paid if early in the programming the core of the application cannot deal efficiently with growing content. I see these issues in my everyday work too for large scale web based applications and I can tell you that it can be [edit] to solve them, as you often have to fully rewrite key (core!) parts of your application and it has to be done in such a way that the application is backwards compatible with the installations of ALL of your existing clients, yet performs significantly better. If you don't do that, you'll be opening Pandora's box and you'll get an avalanche of complaints over you. I do expect TL to have heard the calls for more expansions and better performance loud and clearly, but I also know that these are two conflicting things to solve. It doesn't help that FFS sees several new animals being added each week. Also, depending on what platform you program for, you have a varying amount of control over your hardware resources and the ways you are allowed to use them. I would expect IOS apps to be a LOT more restricted than normal computers etc. in terms of ways to use the resources. TL has to find a solution within those parameters and that's probably not easy.

O.k., to return to your devices: the amount of available storage space seems to be well enough, so there shouldn't be any need (nor benefit) to free up more space by e.g. remove the pictures etc. The 8.7 GB is WELL enough free space. It would be different matter if you had only left, say, 100 MB or so.

The actual bottleneck you're running into needs to be looked up in a different way: being the actual memory usage. Now, I don't know of a way to display the actual memory usage (as opposed to the storage usage), which is a pity because that would be very helpful. But.... there is one thing you CAN do: if you are on any screen you can very quickly click the devices 'home' button twice and if done properly you should see your open programs displayed in a kind of 'carousel view', you can scroll these apps to the left and/or right and this gives you an idea of what programs use part of your memory at that time. Note that you can fully close programs at any time by simply 'swiping' them upwards from this 'carousel' view.
What you can try doing is that before you open FFS, you do this trick and simply force-close everything except FFS. That way you're giving the maximum amount of memory to FFS. It can then still crash, but at least that way you'll have done what you could. You may also power off and on your device, so it clears out stale memory and/or flushes buffered data to the storage too. There's not much else that you can do per device. Newer, more powerful, devices will suffer much less (or not at all) from this, but that doesn't help if you already have a specific device that's not due for being replaced....

O.k. this has become a long post, I hope it helps understanding better what exactly is meant by "(out of) memory errors", the differences between 'storage' and '(volatile) memory', tips for maximising the available amount of memory, and also my assumptions as to just why TL is not giving us the extra expansions that the maxed out users so desperately want.

I hope it's a post that can easily be understood (despite the typical computer slang being used etc.), but in case there are any questions, please let me know and I'll try to explain it further (where I can, of course.. note that I never studied the IOS software architecture nor the hardware of the Apple devices, so I certainly can't tell you everything about it, and part of my answer may even be factually incorrect or incomplete, but in general, the above explains how these issues tend to be typical computer science issues).

Cheers,
Olafo

[sweetdeda]

Wow Olafo, so much information, thank you! Your post is so extremely helpful, it really is great information without being so techie I didn't understand. So there really isn't much I can do with my device to help improve the performance other than making sure I close anything running in the background, which I already make a habit of doing prior to opening FFS. My iPad is a little older and I don't have any intention of replacing it anytime soon, which explains why I have more crashes on it even though it has more storage available than my iPhone 6. Sorry to hear this would not be a quick fix for S8 as I know I am not the only one suffering with an unstable game.
Thank you so much for taking the time to help me understand. It really is appreciated.

[SummerNightSky]

@sweetdeda
Have you noticed any difference in performance when you are on Wi-Fi verses LTE?

[sweetdeda]

@sweetdeda
Have you noticed any difference in performance when you are on Wi-Fi verses LTE?
I really haven't paid attention to that, I will now that you asked and let you know.

[ogreve]

Wow Olafo, so much information, thank you! Your post is so extremely helpful, it really is great information without being so techie I didn't understand. So there really isn't much I can do with my device to help improve the performance other than making sure I close anything running in the background, which I already make a habit of doing prior to opening FFS. My iPad is a little older and I don't have any intention of replacing it anytime soon, which explains why I have more crashes on it even though it has more storage available than my iPhone 6. Sorry to hear this would not be a quick fix for S8 as I know I am not the only one suffering with an unstable game.
Thank you so much for taking the time to help me understand. It really is appreciated.

Hi,
You're most welcome!
I'm glad that I managed to explain it. Hopefully those who are at a loss as to why the game crashes under specific circumstances and/or on specific devices can now understand the reasons for that better. Using the information in the post, they can hopefully also better judge when it is necessary to force-close some programs and/or clear up some more storage or not. :)
Indeed I am afraid that you're right: there's nothing else I can think of that you could do on your current device(s) to alleviate the situation.

A more structural fix for the performance and stability issues would need to come from TL, and as it's not easy to achieve that, it may take some while before that happens. I know IOS to also be "restrictive" as to allowing specific access on the devices. Apple seems to keep a tight lid on doing their best to prevent jailbreaking etc. as much as possible. It's also for that reason that they do not use external flash memory to increase your storage space etc. as that would open up an array of potential ways the OS can more easily be cracked. This then also reflects on what Apple allows the (external) developers to do. I have not yet done any IOS programming myself, but I would completely expect that the memory and storage management is not something that external developers are allowed to manipulate themselves, and that instead they need to use standard so-called "API" calls that Apple makes available for them. That makes it more difficult to do anything about it; they can put their best programmers on trying to resolve these performance issues, but if the OS doesn't allow them to squeeze the maximum out of the hardware, it will be difficult for them to find ways to optimise the performance and stability nonetheless.

The above is not to let them off the hook and give them a "carte blanche" where they can just say "Your game crashes? Tough luck, by newer (more powerful) devices...". These issues SHOULD really be their number 1 priority, much more so than releasing new animals and/or features. I do hope that indeed they do have their priorities set right and that they soon do find a way to give structural improvement which also allows growth of the forest, without directly running into further trouble again. If indeed the main issue with the stability cannot really be resolved by optimising the WAY they store data, they would have to look at ways to optimise the AMOUNT of data they really need to store. Also, some alleviation may be obtained from having less complex animations (or simply fewer of them) all going on at the same time. That would put less of a burden on the memory required for them, as well as on the CPU for calculating them, etc.

Sounds like a nice challenge for TL, and that's why people pay 'em core developers the big bucks! :)

[tuffyjkitten]

Thanks Olafo! Im having the same trouble as sweetdeda and had the same questions. I've been doing everything you suggested, closing the other programs and powering off and it seems to help, not all the time, but most of the time. I've also noticed (and it may just be a coincidence) that if I wait until all the animals in the background behind the news screen start moving and then count to 10 that I can start tapping things without crashing.

I always close everything and power off at night. This is the first thing I open in the morning and every single day for the last week or so it crashes on the Daily Bonus screen. It usually opens on the next try, but I never get my bonus. Not that I need it, but really....

[MaribouMay]

Thank you Olafo! I so appreciate your knowledge and wisdom. This really helps me understand the crashing problem much better.

[jim23cash]

Thanks for the info Olafo! I have asked them to please let us know what devices are "Optimal" for running their apps, as their answer seems to always be: "Your device is not optimized for our games".
I have only been able to play by force closing, uninstalling, then reinstalling, then after I open, waiting for the animals to load and start moving before I close newsfeed, like tuffyjkitten. I still crash often, and every time I have to start over with force close, uninstall. It is a huge pain.
Now that they have started such a busy weekend, with 3 "events" and no habitat increase or expansions, I'm not sure it's going to be worth it to me to continue playing. I have 2 of Service Trio, but no habitat. I can't start storybook without another habitat. I can complete the tourney, since the prize goes into storage, but that's little consolation for being unable to participate in other events. They aren't making me feel like a respected and valued customer. We will see what happens on Monday...