Is it just me or is DS a Memory Hog?
macelene
Posts: 75
I'm using DS 4.9.3.166 Pro 64 bit, and it is constantly causing Microsoft to pop up messages about low memory. I'm trying to get back into making art, and getting used to DS, but so far looks like if I get back into it, I will have to go with Poser. I want to try to get accustumed to DS, I really do, even switched to an NVIDEA card to work with Iray :(. So I want to know if anyone else is having issues with Memory and DS.
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Comments
Operating System?
Amount of RAM?
Win7 Pro 64 bit
processor: Intel Core i7-5820K CPU @3.30GHz
memory 16GB
Are you sure it's memory and not disc space that it is reporting low? I have 12GB and have yet to get a low memory complaint, though my recent scenes have been pretty simple.
Everybody's scene is different. I remember 5 genesis 2 figures with clothing ate up more than 20g memory. If you're not going to add physical memory, try increasing the windows system virtual memory (pagefile), that'l get rid of the low mem warning but system performance will decrease drasticly when virtual memory is used. If you work with heavy scenes often, buy extra ram.
I'm at 16 GB of memory (integrated graphics), and yeah I see the memory message somewhat often for more complex scenes, or for figures with a lot of textures/layers going on.
I did the 'boost virtual memory' trick mentioned above, and that did help. Scene optimizer also seems to help a bit, although you can do a 'poor man's version of that without it Just make sure to hide/delete the unused stuff that's not in the frame, so that the system doesn't have to calculate light bouncing off of that stuff, unless you want it to..
Another thing that can help is to shut off any unnecessary processes in the background/take some things out of your startup tray. Bloatware loves to lurk on systems, and often you just don't need it, despite what the bloatware guys want you to think. Anything you need you should be able to start up as needed, while not have it lurking in your memory the other 98% of the time.
I think it's an evil conspiracy to get us to buy more high end Nvidia graphic cards (for Iray anyways)! Not an option for my laptop though..., I looked into a USB external graphic card, but yeah those aren't really options at this point. I'm thinking that the latest usb 3.0 speeds would make this more practical, but we'll see. Sometimes you just need more graphical power/memory for your laptop, even if the 'bus' is a bit slower...
So I guess this is normal then :(. I was hoping I would no longer have to bybass certain venders because they like making dense meshes, but seems I have to continue :(. I went back and batch resized every texture like I had to do with Poser, since I just don't need textures 4000x4000. I've been stuggling with 2 different renders, 1 only containing Gen3 and an outfit, which I couldn't even render it 200 x 300, and a render with Gen 3, and outfit and a Stonemason set. I didn't really want to turn off anything in the stonemason set, because I couldn't tell what was and wasn't in the scene. Some things where just not showing in the view for them to be obvious. Spent hours trying to find the mystery pieces :/.
Thanks for the help, I guess until I'm a millionaire and can afford a super computer, I'm doomed :(.
I have had this in the past when I first got a new PC & had 16GB - It seems to refer to Virtual Memory & I got rid of the messages by following these instructions :-
Go to your Start Screen; from there press “Wind + X” keyboard keys and choose “System” from the displayed list.
Choose Advanced System Settings, choose the Advanced tab and pick Settings under Performance’s panel.
Once more tap on Advanced tab where you see Virtual Memory panel; from there select “Change”
The “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives” box must be then cleared.
And click on Drive (Volume Label) and choose Custom Size.
Since doing this I have never had the warning again & never have any problems
A quick note on your paging file settings.
Many years back I read a recommendation about setting the minimum and maximum for the paging file to the same value. That way, Windows doesn't have to 'think' about where to find the paging file space as the file size increases, it just 'stakes out' the maximum size and is done with it. I've done this ever since.
A quick search shows me that Microsoft's current recommendation is 1.5x Ram for minimum and 3x Ram for maximum. Several other articles still mention setting min and max to the same value, so apparently it's still preferred to set both to the same value by a number of gurus.
Of course, if hard drive space is at a premium, you'll need to adjust accordingly.
I don't know how to pull up what you are wanting me to pull up. Hitting the Windows button + X doesn't pull up any system.
edit: I did find the system info, had to go a different route to get there. Hopefully I didn't screw anything up, since I didn't know how to calculate the virtual memory. It was set too 200-1048 as compared to your 5000-25000.
Every gig of ram is worth 1024 mb. So in this case, if you input 25000 as your number, you've set up roughly 24.4 gigs of maxiimum paging memory (should be plenty).
Be warned!
Caching on the HD causes permanent I/O, so movements of the heads. This can dramatically shorten the livetime of your HD.
Better expand your system RAM or install the cach on SSD.
SSD storage erodes over time as well. Which is why I went with a Samsung EVO, due to their reportedly higher reliability rates. And in some cases, expanding ram may not be an option (my laptop is currently maxed at 16GB, 2x8, 8GB modules being the maximum supported size according to my laptop manufacturer).
As far as D|S being a memory hog, in my case with an Iray scene containing 3-G3 characters and some surface emission lights (an inside scene), D|S often grabs my entire 16GB while I'm rendering (or have a render view in the aux viewport). Often it also grabs additional disk/virtual memory. I've seen total virtual memory get near 32GB (disk + RAM). Though I don't recall ever, on this or any other computer, ever receiving a low on memory warning. Like others said I assume it's running out of RAM plus disk causing the message.
I do use the Light Manager Pro to disable all the lights that aren't needed before each render to speed things up and cut down on resources, but still the RAM gets sucked up pretty quick.
So to deal with the D|S hogginess, I'm presently waiting for an additional 32GB of RAM in the mail, and if all goes well I'll have 48GB. Unless the existing RAM and the new RAM don't get along, in which case I'll have 32GB. I also just purchased a GTX-1070 card, and that makes a ton of difference. So yeah, when you're doing 3D CG work you need lots of resources. I saw that DAZ says minimum requirement is something like 3GB?? Maybe just to run it, but I can't imagine that being enough to render anything.
Though I have no idea how the NVIDIA card and the system RAM work together with D|S, and why it shows the system virtual memory being used. I assumed most of the rendering resources reside in the graphics card.
Okay I did switch my virtual memory and have had no issues with memory errors. I set the paging to 4548-4548 as someone suggested to make them the same so the computer doesn't have to guess. Now I'm not sure if this change is caused another problem or if it just happens to be a coincidence since the timing was about the same time frame. Has anyone had any issues with this causing other programs to not work as intended or hog drive space. I ask because about the same time I made this change, my Virus scanner started to hog up my drive space.
Settings initial size and maximum size to same value will not make any difference so that is not the reason, the initial size is set to keep the paging file at a small size if possible and grow it when it need to, having a very large paging file at all times lower the performance a bit but will still work, having a huge page file will also use up ram for the adress mapping so 9 times out of 10 keeping the default settings for the paging file is the best solution.
There are many reasons for out of memory problems, one of the is address space, the CPU need linear free areas to allocate address space (not memory, just the list of pages allocated to memory) and if there is no linear space available it can say that you are running out of memory even if you still have tons of memory, but this is not a big problem with 64 bit applications.
Windows have lots of things going on that can cause "weird" behaviour, Windows 10 will compress "unsued" pages and keep them in RAM instead of swapping them to disk for performance reasons, keeping them compressed in ram might be faster than saving them to disk, this can cause it to look like it use more memory than it actually do.
Getting "Low memory" messages is one thing but do not judge some software by looking at numbers in the task manager, they have very little with reality to do.
The "Low memory" message in Windows also do mean low virtual memory and not ram, so setting the max paging size higher may solve any problems with that, with that said I use 32GB ram and have huge scenes (way to big for GPU rendering), DS/Lightwave/Clip Studio paint/GIMP running at the same time and have never got any warning about low memory.
The fact that you have to increase the paging fie size may not lower performance in any way as long as the things in the paging file are not "running", so if DS has to swap out your 3GB ram used by Firefox or Chrome or whatever while you render may not be a problem at all, try to avoid running to many other applications at the same time, Internet browsers are some of the worst offenders and can eat tons of ram for you.