Photoworks and memory management

Hi guys

Trying to render a pretty big plant layout here and it seems like the memory management settings is screwed up in some way. I have tried to lower all PW settings as much as possible but nothing seems to work. Starting at roughly

1000 Mb usage before rendering .....set "maximum memory allocation" to 100 MB...."ray trace depth" to 20...."anti aliasing quality" to medium.....memory usage still climbs up to over 1700 Mb while rendering both to file and screen, and SW runs out of fuel. Any ideas about what I might be missing here....done this a number of times before, but can't figure this one out.

SW 2004 Sp3

2x2,8GHz Xeon Nvidia Quadro4 900XGL 2Gig Ram

Krister L

Reply to
Krister L
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Krister, your around here all the time so I probably don't need to remind you of this, but just in case... Look up a thread about the /3GB switch from about last October. The reason you crash at around 1700 is that is about the most memory that windows can allocate to a single application without enabling the 3GB switch. I think that Wayne Tiffany learned that the /3GB switch also opens up virtual memory (discussed in another thread, from maybe February or March?) if you want to enable the switch, read the instructions in the thread carefully, or else you can permanently prevent your computer form booting. Enabling the /3GB switch will help you out a lot, and may solve your problems. It will allow you to use about 2.4GB before crashing.

I would like to confirm that you have the maximum memory allocation set to

100MB... You are correct that a lower number is what you want, because it sets a limit to memory usage. At 100MB, your memory use should not get very high at all - when the program reached 100MB of memory use above the 1000MB baseline that SWx is using, it should release and drop back down to 1000MB, then climb again, then release, etc... it slows down renderings, but you won't crash. Since you have it set to 100MB, you shouldn't be crashing. I only ask for the confirmation because in my experience people make the number really big assuming that it opens up more memory (I sure thought that!)... which it does, but only to open you up until you reach the crash thresholds of 1.7GB or 2.4-2.6 GB depending on whether you have the /3GB switch. The fact that the memory allocation number can go up to 10GB, which is 6GB more than a 32bit operating system can ever, ever, ever access, was just an unfortunate oversight by the guys writing PWx. Since you are crashing at 100MB memory allocation, you have a bug that ought to get reported. Your memory usage ought to cap out at 1100MB. .

Reply to
Edward T Eaton

Hi Ed

You helped me out once before so I learned from then about these settings....and what bothered me now was that although the max memory allocation really was set to 100....it climbed up to and well passed 1700Mb. I seem to have fond a way to get through though. I started rendering to file with a tiny image size....320x240 pixels and low image quality......got that one through and after that it seems to be working again....don't know if there might be a custom material file that got out of track maybe...didn't get any message about it. Still it feels a little like PW ot SW was looking for something it couldn't find .....I don't know ... just a wag....(wild ass guess)

I know of the 3GB switch ...have tried it on both computers but none of 'em worked .....the work station with W2K started but got a lot of strange messages about missing files and onknown fileformats so I got it back to normal again. I learned from Mike Eckstein that one can have two lines in the boot.ini ....one original and one to play with....that's what got me in to trying ...otherwise I don't think I would have dared. The M60 wiht WXP wouldn't even start....blue screen of death...that's' all I got. I'm gonna look deeper into it and see if I can get the fix for XP from MS

Krister L

"Edward T Eaton" skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@uni-berlin.de...

Reply to
Krister L

Sorry I wasn't a help. A couple of other things that have helped/might help?:

1) lower the image quaility in the document settings. On big assemblies this can chew up enough ram when rendering to make a difference. Personally, I don't see why it would effect it at all beasue all fo the surfaces render fine - the edges of round things just get a littel choppy. But it saved my tail on a rendering of a 5000 part assembly, and it might helpo withyou. 2) you have, of course, limited your reflections? 3) have you bumped UP the memory setting to 500-700 MB? My WAG is that 100 isn't enough to even get the show started, so it never gets a chance to kick in. 4) turn on one thing at a time to diagnose what is killing you. Soft shadows could be doing it, maybe you could render with just one fewer ligths, etc?

I hope soemone comes up witht he magic bullet for you. I have been where you are, and it is infuriating

Reply to
Edward T Eaton

I know that the 3gig switch may help alleviate the problem but the fact remains that PhotoWorks2 still has some memory leaking issues. I have noticed this too, but in my case it hasn't gotten high enough to cause a problem. Most of the time it will keep me around 600mb paged and works just fine but when playing with different materials for a single part and changing them rerender change again rerender so on... it seems to page up to over a gig and never releases the memory until sw is shut down. Can't get it consistent enough to call the VAR though.

Corey

maybe...didn't

Reply to
Corey Scheich

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