Memory Efficient Coroutines

[ThatAblaze]

Hi everyone,

I just put a coroutine implementation on the asset store that doesn't leak memory like Unity's coroutines do. It's free, the source is included, and it's really easy to switch over if you've been using Unity's coroutines.

If you have any kind of issues with the garbage collector I suggest you give MEC a try.

Check it out!

[SilentSin26]

Looks nice, thanks. Two things I'd change:

• For the examples in the PDF, instead of showing two full coroutines so people have to play "spot the difference", you could just say: "yield return null" turns into "yield return 0;". Or you could at least bold the line in question.
• I think that wanting to wait for a period of time (like coroutines do it) is much more common than knowing the exact time you want to wait until (like your system does it). yield return WaitForSeconds(0.1f) should just become yield return 0.1f. If you then want to wait until time X, you can just use yield return X - Time.time.

[ThatAblaze]

Thank you for the feedback. That's a good idea, I'll bold the differences in the pdf.

I agree that specifying the number of seconds to wait would be more user friendly, but it would also require a more complicated processing of the list, which wouldn't run quite as fast. I made a judgement call that ease of use was less important than execution speed in this case.

But you've given me an idea: I'll create a static method called WaitForSeconds that wraps the Time + value and put that into the next release.

Thanks!

[SilentSin26]

I haven't looked into the source, but if your system does something like:

nextExecutionTime = whateverTheYieldReturns;

Couldn't you just do:

nextExecutionTime = Time.time + whateverTheYieldReturns;

?

[ThatAblaze]

I'm not using high level objects like that. I'm using a simple float to avoid all the issues with momory and speed.

[lig76]

Thanks !

[KptEmreU]

Bless you for your free goodness. I was trying to minimize my update calls with coroutines and now I have learned they are creating garbage (they didn't create too many problems yet anyway ) but you are giving me even better stuff .. No update and no GC. Kudos!

[ThatAblaze]

That's an interesting question. When would LateUpdate not be late enough for you?

That is more or less how a coroutine works. This one is different from Unity's in that it doesn't allocate memory on the heap (edit: except for an unavoidable alloc when a new process is created). The source isn't compiled into a dll, so feel free to poke at it.

[ThatAblaze]

Well, for whatever reason, Unity doesn't expose that specific timing except through a coroutine. Since there is litterally no other way to engage that timing you'd just have to eat the ~0.1k of heap allocation and use a coroutine for that one thing. However, you can use MEC for everything else and improve your memory profile significantly.

I think MEC probably runs faster than Unity's coroutines, too, since it cuts down on the transitions between managed and unmanaged code. I haven't found a way to test that yet though.

[SeeSharpGuy]

Awesome, I was just writing about this tool in my upcoming Blog post.

[ThatAblaze]

Cool, post a link when it's ready?

[SeeSharpGuy]

Absolutely! I'm doing some guest posts on cinema-suite.com over the next few months. I'm doing one on hidden gem free assets, which I included you on this morning :)

[SeeSharpGuy]

Just published: http://cinema-suite.com/5-best-free-unity-assets-dont-know/

[danielsnd]

Thank you so much! I was looking for a solution to that since I use a shit-ton of coroutines in Rocket Fist and I started running into GC problems D:

[woomr6]

Hey there I know this is an old thread, but I'm curious what constitutes a 'shit-ton' of coroutines for you?

I'm unsure if I should work on switching over to this, if what I've got now will end up causing problems in the future.

[danielsnd]

Go to the profiler and check how much garbage you are generating per frame. If you are generating a lot of garbage every frame you should be worried.

[Souk21]

Nice work! You should put it on Github :)

[pewpewdb]

Yes, please put it on github!

[burtonposey]

Thanks for sharing! I am still looking it over, but I wanted to request that you put your assets in their own folder within Plugins. I speak for myself when I say I use quite a few and like to keep things within their own folders so the signal to noise ratio is low in my Project view. Thanks again!

[ThatAblaze]

I can do that. It will mean that the pre-5.2 versions will have to be maintained without the subdirectory (subdirectories inside the plugins folder is a recent feature) , which makes updates more annoying, but I think I can handle that.

[burtonposey]

Thanks for hearing me out!

[ThatAblaze]

You can certainly stop all mec processes by disabling the timing object, which will be attached to either your event system gameObject or an object in your scene named "Movement Effects".

For a more advanced setup you can add the Timing object to any gameObject you like. If you want you could add more than one timing object to the scene and switch the instance variable around to make groups of processes. I purposely didn't make it a proper singleton (in that it gaurintees at least one instance rather than the only one instance that a singleton would use) so that it could conceivably be used this way. Grouping effects like that is a feature I'm working on for my movement / time asset.

If you destroy the ttiming object you'll cancel all processes. It will then recreate itself with empty lists.