Mantra Memory Management, need some suggestions

[A. Morales]

Hows it going guys,

I'm currently rendering a fairly heavy scene with BGEOs written out for all aspects of the scene, some of these files are over 50gbs + and are all loaded upon rendering.

Mantra is now giving me memory allocation problems once the scene starts loading the higher density frames but is able to finish one frame before she quits.

Trying to optimize the scene and render settings I've reduce the tile size to half (8) , been running through command line rendering through hbatch, tried hideing aspects of the shot that cant be scene in camera anymore etc.

This was all working fine for the first 90ish frames , but until the debris system starts loading up mantra decides to only do one frame and quit afterwards (if anyone has a solution to this that be great, is it just not flushing out the memory fast enough?)

I was hopeing there could be some watch to use a recently installed 1tb hd as a temporary ram scratch disk but that knowledge is a little beyond me especially on linux, which brings me to specs

Intel i7 930

9gbs ram

2 tb harddrive

ubuntu 13.04

houdini 469

if theres no way to try to work around this without upgrading more ram then so be it I guess its time to upgrade this desktop a tad bit.

as for now ill manually render each frame, it seems to be doing the job and it does finish the frame. I'm not sure why mantra isnt able to flush the memory fast enough to pull up the next frame data..

- amorales

[substep]

I can't speak much to speeding up mantra, or the errors yours recieving. But perhaps this will help with your swap issues.

http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2007/07/02/swapboost-v01alpha-early-testers-wanted/

basically, it's a script you run that uses a usb thumb drive as extra swap space. super easy

[A. Morales]

Thanks Garbanzo,

I was doing a little more reading and was able to use ubuntus swap drive size adjustment , just gave it more swap size and was able to render away, save some money on ram woo!

-Adad

[Mikael]

I would do a test with delayed load (you load in the geometry in render time, render time goes up due to this). I know it saves a lot of memory when working with particles and keeps your scene files down in size, I'm not really sure it works as well with geometry. peter quint goes through a bit of this in particles II (vimeo.com/12093352)

Edited September 26, 2013 by Mikael

[rsd]

KD-Tree raytracing accelerator in Mantra has possibilty to manage memory instead of BVH. This may save from swap but only when backet not contains too many geometry.