Limit Houdini RAM usage

[frogurt]

Hello everyone,

 

first I apologize if this is not the correct section to post this, I will move it if so.

I am currently running pyro sims on my machine, it has 64GB of RAM. Now, I mistakenly set one attribute before running another sim (friggin divergence premult) and went to bed to let it work during the night,

once I got back it just ran few frames and some of them took up to 1.2h. I hit the RAM limit and my PC basically froze, nothing worked and had to restart it.

Is there a way to tell Houdini to use up to a specific amount of RAM? So that my system does not get stuck?

Or the way to achieve this is by using -j command in terminal and set a certain number of threads used by Houdini?

 

Thanks in advance,

-f

[Atom]

In a pyro sim, your ram allocation control is the divsize parameter on the PyroObject node. Don't set it too high. Physical memory is your limit with Houdini.  Once you cross the physical limit boundary,calculating speed goes down the tubes.

I use an estimate expression to determine how many voxels my current box size and divsize will contain. Keep this number reasonable, like in the hundreds of millions tops, and your sim experience will go much smoother. ILM uses 65million voxels for preview and 165million for final render. If you are simming larger than that, you may want to revisit your camera work and figure out the best way to optimize the scene.

ch("sizex")/ch("divsize")*ch("sizey")/ch("divsize")*ch("sizez")/ch("divsize")

 

[symek]

8 hours ago, frogurt said:

(...)Is there a way to tell Houdini to use up to a specific amount of RAM? So that my system does not get stuck?

Or the way to achieve this is by using -j command in terminal and set a certain number of threads used by Houdini?

On Linux you can limit Houdini's memory with cgroups on kernel level. -j just limits the number of cores Houdini will attempt to use, but doesn't constrain memory access.  Simplest way is to tune your sim as proposed by Atom. 

hth,

skk.