Memory Leak in Attract Mode

First let me say I'm a big fan of BigBox. I made the switch from Maximus Arcade and I'm completely in love with your software. Great job. I'm having an issue and I know I'm not the only one. I have several friends who have the same problem with BigBox.

I'm fairly certain that you have a memory leak in BigBox. When running BigBox in attract mode my computer will eventually run out of RAM even when I reduce the coverflow to the lowest settings. I've added more memory and this extends the time it will run before it crashes from running out of memory, but it will run out.

Here is my guess on what's going on. I'm assuming you are loading or caching art into memory. As Attract mode runs it randomly selecting games and it loads/caches the art. Overtime memory increases, there are two factors that cause it to grow. The number of ROMs and the size of the Art. Reducing the size of the art causes it to use less memory, however if there are enough roms then it will most likely run out of memory. I have about 2000 ROMs even with 16GB of RAM it will still run out of memory at the lowest setting. It take time, but it runs out and I have to restart it. This is a problem because I have this in a dedicate arcade cabinet and I have friends and family play it. I don't want them to have to use a keyboard and mouse to restart BigBox when it's not working.

Based on my guess, maybe you could use the FIFO (First in First Out) pattern with capping the cache size or force a cache clear. I might be completely wrong and most likely I am.

Anyways great job and I'm really hoping you can fix this issue.

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