How to Fix a Game Running Out of Memory While Loading

Running out of memory on load is a transition-peak problem. Freeing first or streaming fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Free the old level first

Unload the previous level's assets before loading the next, so both are not resident at once. Loading the new while the old is still in memory doubles the peak and exceeds the budget.

2. Stream instead of bulk-loading

Load assets incrementally as needed rather than all up front, so the peak working set is smaller. Streaming keeps memory bounded through the transition instead of spiking.

3. Reduce transition peak

Use a lightweight loading scene between levels to release everything, and load the next from a clean state. Minimizing what is resident during the switch keeps the peak under the limit.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.