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I recently installed StarCraft II, by installing the battle.net luancher, through Lutrus. I played a match of Direct Strike with my friends and I had severe lag, so I opened system monitor. I have 8GB of RAM and on the high settings, 100% of it was used and on the lowest settings, it still used over 60% and caused a lot of lag.

This happened on Ubuntu 22.04, I will add more of my system information, when I can.

Dejagperd
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    How exactly are you measuring memory usage? What value exactly is 100% or 60%? Can you include screenshots, or, even better, the output of the terminal command free -m? – marcelm Sep 04 '23 at 09:55
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    "it still used over 60% and caused a lot of lag." - Why do you think that "using over 60% RAM" and "having lag" are correlated? – marcelm Sep 04 '23 at 09:56
  • That sounds annoying and what happens if you temporarily uninstall StarCraft II and replace it with two or three other apps having supposedly similar system requirements? – Robbie Goodwin Sep 04 '23 at 16:51
  • Something I think might be happening, is the Direct Strike mode, might have a lot more to process than other modes. – Dejagperd Sep 04 '23 at 17:42

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I don't know the specifics of StarCraft II, but 8GB of RAM is not a huge amount these days.

Blizzard Support - StarCraft II System Requirements says minimum 2GB but recommends 4GB, which means it will use 4GB if it is available. I suspect a game will often try to use close to all available RAM.

And then you're running it in Lutrus which emulates some version of Windows in addition to running StarCraft II.

It does not surprise me that all of your RAM was being used. Why are you expecting that it should not use 8GB RAM?

Also, perhaps you know this already, but note that linux will use all your RAM for caching if you don't use it. If you look a the top utility look for the "avail Mem" value, not the "Mem free" value. If linux is using e.g. 2GB for cache, you'll have that much less free mem, but it is available. As soon as some process wants to use it, the oldest cache entries will be dropped.

Peter V. Mørch
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  • "I suspect a game will often try to use close to all available RAM." Not at all. I have 32GB in my system and most games won't dare touching half. – Mast Sep 04 '23 at 14:44
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    @Mast up to a reasonable limit. 32GB is more than enough but also completely opposite from OPs position because 8GB just isn't any kind of large excess – QuestionablePresence Sep 04 '23 at 17:01
  • "emulates some version of Windows" Lutris uses Wine under the hood (at least my installation of the Blizzard launcher does), and Wine famously is not an emulator. It will cost system resources, cartainly. But emulation is not how it's doing its thing. – Arthur Sep 05 '23 at 07:49