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How much RAM is too much ?


AntoineSfx

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Under Linux, is there an upper limit to the amount of RAM Houdini can handle right now ?

I have 64 GB right now, but I'm considering an upgrade. I assume  I will hit another bottleneck before RAM starts to really be a problem.

Can you give me a real life example for an indie user where I would benefit from having more than 64 GB of RAM ? By real life example, I mean ... if I can go to a random frame with no delay of a large sim, but each frames now requires 4 hours to render.. I now have another problem to solve

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7 hours ago, AntoineSfx said:

Under Linux, is there an upper limit to the amount of RAM Houdini can handle right now?

No. Linux and Houdini (assuming x86-64) can both handle more memory than any computer available for purchase right now.

7 hours ago, AntoineSfx said:

I have 64 GB right now, but I'm considering an upgrade. I assume I will hit another bottleneck before RAM starts to really be a problem.

Memory isn't a problem until you run out of it. If you don't ever run out of memory then upgrading it won't help anything. If you run out of memory sometimes then upgrading it might be a good idea. Look at a resource monitor while you work to get an idea of how much memory is being used for various tasks.

7 hours ago, AntoineSfx said:

Can you give me a real life example for an indie user where I would benefit from having more than 64 GB of RAM?

Simulations.

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We had a run away sim on RIPD in 2012 that would eat up to the max 128 gigs of ram on the server farms in Taiwan at the time. Generally this should be an extreme outlier like it was. The Shape of Water team in Toronto had a few sims that did this too. Every film generally has one or two shots that depending on the artist will use up this much ram for a sim.

Another case is if you are doing some heavy handed photogammetry where you toss hundreds of photos at it, as opposed to a proper plate set of like a dozen high resolution photos.

A more practical math for evaluation is for farm nodes we usually do 1 cpu core to 2/4 gigs of ram for rendering. So if you get one of the new thread rippers and your machines is part of the farm, it can be used to run dozens of small jobs or a massive sim. So for a comp Render node or FX render node.

Most studios on average have worker stations at 64 gigs of ram. It's generally cheaper for a studio to give them a second box than over doing the ram.

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  • 1 month later...
On 8/26/2018 at 5:11 AM, Zetha said:

I have been told that you can use a SSD hard drive to reduce the amount of RAM that you need in a sim.

Swap and virtual memory are not a replacement for memory. All they'll do is prevent a hard crash when the machine runs out of physical memory. Relying on swap and virtual memory to get processing done is tedious at best. Something that should take an hour could take days and days.

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