Memory Leak

[Chris_TC]

I already sent Face a PM, but now I think the crashing during animation renders has a different cause. There seems to be some sort of memory leak.

Whenever a frame renders, the task manager shows roughly the same amount of RAM usage for both Octane and XSI:


However, the amount of committed memory keeps on increasing throughout the render and with every frame:


I think this memory leak actually occurs in XSI because the amount of committed memory only goes down by about 500 MB whenever Octane closes. After frame 12, I hit Cancel on the Render. The memory amount was 6,000 MB with Softimage still open. Closing Softimage brought this down to 1,200 MB.

I've never seen this kind of behavior in Softimage, so I assume it has something to do with the plugin? It causes the render to crash after about a dozen frames on my system.

[Amplitude]

thank you for the insight Chris, I've seen something similar happening to my rig.
I also had a very large page file (like 16gb) after a 60 frames animation has been rendered.

[Chris_TC]

My Windows 7 was set to automatically manage the pagefile, and apparently it wouldn't go beyond a certain value.

I have now manually set the pagefile size to go up to 15 GB, and I'm currently rendering frame 22 without a crash. However, the memory consumption is at 10GB/11GB, and obviously it keeps increasing. When it hits 15 GB it'll probably crash.

[Chris_TC]

Yup, I can now confirm that everything hinges on the pagefile.
If I allow it to get really, really big the animation keeps rendering without any crashes. Memory consumption is now almost 30 GB, the render keeps going and the pagefiles keep growing.

[face]

Which kind of scene you want to render?
Models, meshes, pointclouds or mixed?

face

[El Burritoh]

Does this behavior occur with XSI open, but Octane rendering a scene brought in manually instead of with the plug-in?

[Chris_TC]

Which kind of scene you want to render?
Models, meshes, pointclouds or mixed?

The scene contains a pointcloud, but it's hidden and doesn't export. Everything that exports is just a polygon mesh.

Does this behavior occur with XSI open, but Octane rendering a scene brought in manually instead of with the plug-in?

No. The leak does appear to occur in XSI because all that committed memory is only freed up once I close XSI.

[face]

Hm, i can´t confirm that...
I have exported a 250MB mesh (~3mio tris) a couple of times and it works.

When anyone can send me his scene to test, it would be nice.

face

[face]

Hm...
As i wrote, i haven´t the leak and without your help, i can´t reproduce it.
Also tell me what should i do now?

face

[Chris_TC]

Well, here's a simplified example scene. Render the animation, and you can literally watch your pagefile grow and grow and grow. It doesn't grow as fast as my full animation with additional geometry. But if you render 20 or 30 frames you should see a huge difference in memory consumption between frame 1 and frame 30.