How to Soak Test a Game for Memory Leaks

Soak testing runs the game long enough for slow leaks and degradation to appear. Here is how to do it.

How to fix it

1. Run a long, repetitive session

Leave the game running for hours, ideally automating a loop that repeats representative actions (load levels, spawn, fight). Slow leaks need time and repetition to become visible.

2. Monitor resources over time

Track memory, handles, and object counts throughout. A metric that climbs steadily and never recovers is a leak; the soak test is what makes that slope visible at all.

3. Capture long-run failures with context

If it crashes or degrades late, capture the state at that point. Long-run failures are expensive to reproduce, so automatic capture with memory and context saves you replaying hours.

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.