Is there a reason on a tiled build, that WM needs to keep completed tiles in Memory after its finished with it? on a 3x3 grid with 4096 HM, my 16GB of ram can’t do it, with an over clocked i7? I don’t think its to much that I am trying to do?
Nothing huh? No response? You don’t have one, or you just don’t WANT to answer?
Tiled builds do not keep completed tiles in memory.
Things to check:
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If you’ve selected “Merge to Single File” in the tiled options, in which case it needs to allocate one mega-sized output and then bring each tile in sequentially to place it into the whole, which does take a lot of memory.
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You might be trying to build all of your tiles at once if you have enough threads, which will require lots of memory, obviously. You can adjust the maximum number of tiles or devices to build at a time in Preferences->Maximum Builds at once; try setting it to 1 or 2. This is usually not substantially less efficient in any case, as the additional cores can be put to use building within each tile.
Failed that, it’s possible that you’ve run into a memory leak in some device, but I haven’t had any report of that during a tiled build in quite a while. Feel free to post your world that is producing the problem here, or email to support@world-machine.com for analysis, as I"d be very interested to see any that exhibit this problem.
I am going to guess that it might be a memory leak. WM will show 20-40% memory usage, while “system” will show the rest to 100%… I don’t know why it would be using a “system” process to use memory.
I will send the project file (I only use one tiled output at a time.)
I can’t find any evidence of a memory leak building the file you provided, nor of WM keeping tiles in memory after processing. All memory is released between tiles as expected – you can verify this by watching both WM’s internal reporting tools in the build stats window, and also monitor the process memory from windows’s task manager or resource monitor. The figures should be within a hundred MB of each other.
The fact that the memory used shows up as “system” is very important – WM never allocates any memory that is not within its own process, and the internal memory stats of WM jive with what Windows reports for the process memory usage. Whatever is using the memory is not, strictly speaking, World Machine. I see two possibilities then:
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You’re exceeding your system memory during the build and Windows is swapping virtual memory.
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During the tiled build process, WM writes each tile to the temporary folder you specified in preferences when it finishes. It’s possible there’s some interaction here, such as a RAM disk for WM’s temporary folder, misbehaving antivirus scanner, or somehow having the file system driver hoarding memory while it writes to disk.
-> Do you see this same mysterious “system” memory usage with smaller tiled builds?
One important thing I noticed in your world is that you have blending set to 100% for the tiled build. This means that each tile is built oversized by 100% then blended with its neighbor – so a 4096 tile is actually an 8192 tile before blending. This means it will take 4x more memory, and at least 4x longer, than you might otherwise expect. I would recommend using a smaller blend percentage unless you find you simply can’t get acceptable results any other way – usually 25% or so is perfectly fine.
With 16GB of RAM, you shouldn’t be running into issues here regardless, and I don’t know why you have excess “system” memory usage. One possible thing to try is to make sure you have “Use low-priority build thread” checked in the preferences->build options menu. It’s possible that something in your system is being starved of CPU time by the build and is accumulating garbage; Having the build threads be low priority should help ensure that this can’t happen.
That all makes sense. I will try all those recommendations