Memory Leak / Purge Memory Command?

[mattd]

I am trying to render some heavy geometry via the geometry ROP. On any single frame, it works well, however If I try to render the ROP as a range (240 frames) is dies about 30 frams with an out of memory error. houdini itself is taking 1400 mb. I am running xp64 which should have the 3G limit, so I would expect a bit more ceiling on a 32bit app.

The bgeos themselves that I am writing are only 10mb/frame, but it is full of nurbs surfaces.

Is there a command to clear the SOP cache that I could put in the pre-frame script?

I think it would also work if I were to make a script that repeatadly opens the hip file, renders a frame and closes it, but I am a bit unsure how to go about this. I have not found a definitive answer as to how to run houdini from the DOS commandline, and render a single specific frame. If I knew that I could use our renderfarm manager to queue the frames.

THanks for any help

MD

whoops, just found sopcache -c, testing it now, so far so good...

MD

UPDATE, naw it's f'ed. It does creep up slower, but you still have to quit houdini to release the RAM.

Now I am trying to get the command line to work.

I am trying to render some heavy geometry via the geometry ROP. On any single frame, it works well, however If I try to render the ROP as a range (240 frames) is dies about 30 frams with an out of memory error. houdini itself is taking 1400 mb. I am running xp64 which should have the 3G limit, so I would expect a bit more ceiling on a 32bit app.

The bgeos themselves that I am writing are only 10mb/frame, but it is full of nurbs surfaces.

Is there a command to clear the SOP cache that I could put in the pre-frame script?

I think it would also work if I were to make a script that repeatadly opens the hip file, renders a frame and closes it, but I am a bit unsure how to go about this. I have not found a definitive answer as to how to run houdini from the DOS commandline, and render a single specific frame. If I knew that I could use our renderfarm manager to queue the frames.

THanks for any help

MD

[AdamJ]

Setting the 'cull Level' to 5 in Preferences->Objects and Geometry->SOP Cache 'might' also help with interactive cooking.

[sibarrick]

Are you writing out a sequence from a single object, or lots of seperate objects?

In the second case I've found that if i try and do it all with rops it will fail, so I tend to always do it in hscript with my own script and delete the objects as I go to free up as much memory as possible.