Frame rate + memory issue. Can't pinpoint why

Not sure what section to post this in, but I think this is probably the best.

Hi there. I have a level that’s a WIP in Unreal 4.7.1, and it’s causing me some issues in terms of frame rate and memory usage, but it’s odd because it’s working the opposite of the way that I would expect. In the scene below are:

  • A row of battleships on the left and right of the screen, each with turret and weakpoint child actor components with all sorts of logic that I have disabled. Each, however also has a recursive blueprint function that randomly fires blue lasers towards the other side. This is meant for aesthetic effect and does not contribute to gameplay; they are simply static meshes that get their visibility toggled.

  • My character in the middle, above all the action so you could get this view. He currently has one dynamic material, a few particle effects whose visibilities are turned on during certain gameplay functions, and a grapple ability that is normally gated to closed, but is regardlessly still firing.

  • A giant, snowflake-like alien ship on the right with a material that oscillates its opacity and such. It is pretty huge and I don’t think it has maybe the cheapest polygon count. Otherwise, at the moment, it does nothing but sit there.

  • A lightmass importance volume that encompasses all this. Everything that can be statically lit, is.

Now, I expected some kind of a frame rate drop, but It seems to only occur when I look behind the giant alien ship. I can look at the other battleships as much as I want, but as soon as I look at the empty space behind the big boss ship, my frame rate goes from 60 to 30. It’s weird that I get this issue when NOT looking at generally performance intense stuff. I should also note that my memoryn usage steadily climbs to about 3 gbs.

I tried looking in the profiler, but I’m no programmer/computer scientist, so I don’t know how to interpret my findings. What techniques/issues should I look at to get some frame rate back? Could I have a memory leak somehow?