Active Matter Memory Leak Fix: How to Stop Stutters and Crashes on 16GB RAM

I’ve sunk a stupid number of hours into Active Matter. The anomalies, the tense PvPvE raids, and the gunplay that makes every fight feel like it could be your last are all great. Matter Team and Gaijin Network built something special on the Dagor Engine.

Then comes the third raid of the night. You launch at a buttery 90+ FPS, and by the time you’re sneaking toward extraction the game is hitching like a slideshow. A few minutes later you’re staring at your desktop with an out-of-memory error and your loot is gone.

If that sounds familiar and you’re on 16GB of RAM, you’re not alone. Reddit, Steam forums, and YouTube benchmark comments are full of the same story: smooth start, ugly middle, crash at the end. This is a memory leak, and it’s brutal on a 16GB system.

I’ll walk you through what’s happening and the five fixes that keep my sessions stable without restarting the client after every raid.

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What’s Actually Going On

Active Matter requests fresh memory blocks for incoming textures, audio cues, and world states, but it doesn’t always release the old ones. Your Working Set climbs raid after raid, and anomalies and physics-heavy objects make it worse.

Three things fight over your 16GB pool:

Once physical RAM hits roughly 95%, Windows leans on the pagefile and the Standby List. The OS doesn’t free that standby cache fast enough when the game screams for memory, so the CPU sits waiting and you get a micro-stutter. If demand outruns available virtual memory entirely, Windows kills the process. That’s your crash.

The devs will hopefully patch garbage collection at the engine level. Until then, these workarounds are what we’ve got.

Fix #1: Set a Fixed Pagefile (The Biggest Win)

Auto-managed pagefiles are a trap here. When RAM fills mid-firefight, Windows tries to expand the pagefile on the fly, and that resize is exactly when your game freezes. A fixed, generous pagefile on your fastest drive gives the leaked data somewhere to go without the hitching.

How to set it:

1. Press Win + R, type sysdm.cpl, hit Enter.
2. Go to the Advanced tab, then Settings under Performance.
3. In Performance Options, open the Advanced tab and click Change under Virtual Memory.
4. Uncheck Automatically manage paging file size for all drives.
5. Pick your OS or game drive. It should be an SSD, ideally NVMe.
6. Choose Custom size.
7. Initial size: 16384 MB.
8. Maximum size: 24576 MB (1.5x your RAM).
9. Click Set, then OK, and restart.

This was the single biggest improvement for me. The crashes didn’t vanish completely, but the freeze-then-die pattern mostly did.

Fix #2: Run Intelligent Standby List Cleaner (ISLC)

Even with a fixed pagefile, Windows is lazy about dumping the Standby List. As Active Matter leaks, that list swells and chokes your free memory. ISLC from Wagnardsoft is a tiny tool that purges the cache the moment free memory gets low.

Setup:

1. Download ISLC from the official Wagnardsoft source only.
2. Extract it and run as administrator.
3. Set ‘The list size is at least’ to 1024 MB.
4. Set ‘Free memory is lower than’ to 4096 MB.
5. Tick Start ISLC minimized and auto-start with Windows.
6. Hit Start.

Park it in your system tray and forget about it. Whenever free RAM dips under 4GB, ISLC wipes the standby cache instantly, so the game never waits on the OS.

Fix #3: Turn Off Windows Memory Compression

Memory Compression squeezes inactive pages to save RAM, which is fine for spreadsheets. On a gaming rig fighting a leak, Windows keeps compressing piles of junk data, and your CPU usage spikes right when you need frames.

Disable it via PowerShell:

1. Right-click Start and open Terminal (Admin) or Windows PowerShell (Admin).
2. Type Get-MMAgent and check the MemoryCompression line.
3. If it says True, run: Disable-MMAgent -MemoryCompression
4. Restart your PC.

You get more predictable allocation and less CPU overhead. I noticed smoother frame pacing in longer raids after this one.

Fix #4: Trim Your Graphics Settings

When your GPU’s VRAM fills up, textures spill into system RAM and feed the leak faster. On an 8GB card with Ultra textures, you’re basically pouring gasoline on it. Here’s what I changed:

• Texture Resolution: Drop from High/Epic to Medium. Texture streaming is the main RAM hog in Dagor, and Medium cuts the footprint by up to 35%.
• Shadows and Post-Processing: Set to Medium or Low. Big shadow maps demand huge continuous allocations.
• Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS): Use your hardware’s option on Quality or Balanced. Lower internal resolution means smaller frame buffers.
• Motion Blur and Film Grain: Turn them off. They give you nothing competitively and cost memory cycles.
• Nvidia Reflex: Set to On + Boost to keep CPU-GPU pacing steady when memory hiccups hit.

Medium textures still look great in this game. The atmosphere doesn’t fall apart, and the stability gain is worth it.

Fix #5: Kill the Windows NDU Leak

This one is a sneaky culprit. Windows has a long-standing bug in its Network Data Usage (NDU) driver that leaks non-paged pool memory, and high-tick-rate online games make it worse. Active Matter’s netcode stacks that on top of its own leak.

Disable it in the registry (back up your registry first if you’re nervous):

1. Press Win + R, type regedit, hit Enter.
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Ndu
3. Find the Start entry on the right.
4. Right-click, Modify, and change the Value Data from 2 to 4.
5. Click OK, close the editor, restart.

A value of 4 sets the service to disabled, so it stops bleeding non-paged pool memory during long sessions.

Quick Summary

Final Verdict

Playing Active Matter on 16GB takes some babysitting, and that’s a bummer for a game this good. Stack all five fixes together, though, and the difference is night and day: the micro-stutters fade and the out-of-memory crashes drop off sharply. You can finally focus on your extraction run instead of watching Task Manager.

None of this replaces a proper engine-level fix from the developers, so keep your fingers crossed for a patch. Until then, set up the pagefile and ISLC first, since they give the biggest return for the least effort, and work through the rest if you still see hitching.

If you’re still crashing after all of this, upgrading to 32GB is the surest cure. For everyone else, see you at extraction.