Android Studio Memory Profiler, what is "Others"

I'm trying to track down why a recent update of our game is using much more memory even though we've lowered shader, texture and mesh memory usage. In previous builds this "others" section in android studio is at least 100mb lower than in our current version.

I've gone down the path of removing scripts, removing plugins, stopping intensive allocations from happening but it really seems to happen whenever I load in a scene.

I've turned off addressable scene loading and gone back to normal scene loading, triple checked we're using the simplest implementation of addressable instantiation, made sure there are no duplicates between groups etc.

I just can't figure out why this others keeps increasing, eventually it will reach 300mb and crash out this particular device, something isn't clearing.

Anyone got some advice on how to find out whats doing it?

 

Hi!

According to the Android Studio Documentation https://developer.android.com/studio/profile/memory-profiler the "others" category is "Memory used by your app that the system isn't sure how to categorize."

Based on that sparse documentation snippet, my guess is that they are unity objects stored, serialized, and held in memory in a way the android OS doesn't understand.

According to your profiling your Object count is 25587. I'm not 100% sure, but do you have a large number of scriptable objects with lots of other object references? Possibly some other objects stored in memory? There are also a large number of scene objects which I imagine are storing a large number of references as well. Occlusion Culling could possibly help there or scene partitioning.

As you can probably tell, I am not sure on my diagnosis especially because you would have to have a crazy number of objects and references for this to be the case, but I hope this helps!

 

I think it is probably used by assets loaded from StreamingAssets.