Other than creating countless groups, is there way to clean unused memory?

My problem with groups is that its based on the idea of grouping related items together, so that the whole group will free memory when every element of that group gets destroyed

this is terrible for eg items. lets say i have a helmet and an armor.

or lets say i have 100 helmets and 100 armors.
100 helmets and 99 armors can be unloaded, but you will not be able to clean memory for any of them, because one of them is still loaded.

thats cause theyre all part of the same group.


but in this case id have to create 200 groups for armors and helmets alone.
not only is this unscalable, its probably slow and a poor choice overall


is there any other way? i want to be able to clean/free memory of models that i no longer use

 

I am also curious if anyone has any good ideas on this. (I've run into the same problem). My current solution is to mark some groups as "pack separately" so each prefab ends up in it's own asset bundle. However, if you have any shared textures, they will be duplicated across multiple bundles in this model, unless you go flag each dependency texture individually and also put them in an addressables group somewhere.

 

even with pack separately, as far as i know, you still need to destroy/unload all objs from given group before it frees memory