Carrara 8.5 High Memory Usage with Genesis
swordkensia
Posts: 348
Hi All,
I have just started using Carrara again after several years away from it, and I am finding that 8.5 is using huge amounts of system Ram when Genesis is placed in a scene, and I need to know if this is typical.
I have read posts on the forum from people saying that they are not having any issues using Genesis in Carrara, but alas this has not been my experience.
For example on start up Carrara is using 175mb of system ram(monitored via task manager). Add one naked Genesis Figure Ram usage shoots up to 1.17gb. Add hair to Genesis figure Ram Usage shoots up to 1.75gb. note figure is not even clothed yet and nearly 2gb of ram is being used.!!!!
.Export scene to octane via Plugin for Carrara, re-check task manager and suddenly ram usage has shot upto 2.7Gb,..
What an earth is going on,.????, not to mention scenes that I have been working on suddenly not opening anymore due to some strange error message, which REALLY pee'd me off. 10 days of work lost.
Is this typical.???, I really want to use Carrara again, along with Genesis, but if it does not work, I will be forced to go back to using Studio, which is a real shame as I REALLY like the new octane for Carrara plugin.
Is there anything that can be done at the user level to make Genesis work more effectively in Carrara.??
I am runnining an intel i7 3930k (6cores / 12threads) @4.2ghz, 16gb Ram, Evga780gxt SC (6gb) + Nvidia Titan Black, on Windows 64bit Home Premium.. if that helps any.
Any advice greatly appreciated,
Cheers,
S.K.
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Comments
I don't use Carrara 8.5 or Genesis myself. But I do know a few things about Windows' memory management.
Given the numbers that you cited -- specifically a maximum of 2.7 GB and 16 GB of RAM -- I would say that you have nothing to worry about from a memory standpoint. This is contingent on what else you are doing with your computer because I assume you have only Carrara running. If you have browsers, other applications or ghost-knows-how-many background services running...well that changes things considerably.
If you really want to know what is going on, I recommend using the free SysInternals tools: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb795533 Interpreting the data that these tools expose does take a pretty solid grounding in how Windows works under the covers.
You mention "a strange error" that caused you to lose 10 days of work. First question, did your really not save your scene even one time in ten days? Unfortunately, DAZ developers have put zero thought into properly handling errors. I chalk it up to sheer laziness on their part. There really is no way to tie your "strange error" to a memory problem though.
The real answer lies in attaching a debugger to Carrara and analyzing its crash. If you think SysInternals are deep...debugging is an entirely new universe. Definitely not for the faint of heart. But until DAZ actually stabilizes and codes up some effective error management (I'd sooner hold my breath until the next ice age), we simply won't have an easy time of things.
In short, save often.
If you are running multiple apps with Carrara, you might consider doubling your RAM to 32 GB. Total Windows system memory is your RAM plus your paging file (often stored on the same drive as your Windows folder...but heavy paging between memory and disk is a performance killer).
I hope this helps. Feel free to share more details like screenshots...maybe there are things that can be done to reduce/eliminate your crash.
Just a tangential piece of data, FWIW ... I also don't use Genesis, but I do run Carrara 8.5 Pro (DAZ lowered the price briefly to what I thought it was worth vs. 8.1) I don't know anything about Windows memory management, but just out of curiosity I ran a similar test. Started C8.5 Pro, memory usage 109MB (per task manager). Added M4, memory 230MB. Added some hair, memory 576MB. (All memory usage for Carrara.exe, Task Manager "Private Working Set".) The overall RAM usage for everything running (Windows, etc.) at the last point was 2.81 GB.
System: 16GB RAM, Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit, Core i7 3.5 GhZ.
I haven't had any trouble with C 8.5 Pro using Gen4 characters, but I also don't see a lot of advantage over 8.1. I know 8.5 adds support for later generation figures, etc., but so far I'm happy with my (embarrassingly large) Gen 4 collection.
"Working set" is the amount of memory allocations done by a process (Carrara.exe in this case) that are in RAM.
"Private Working Set" is the memory allocations specific to that process alone. Processes can share code - for example the Open File dialog box - so that Windows does not use up RAM by loading it repeatedly. Thus "Private Working Set" is one of the best measures of memory for a process.
Almost undoubtedly the newer generations have a lot more impact than Gen 4.
OK, thanks, I didn't know that about "private/working set". I'm the kind of "user" that hopes I never have to know the details. Like an old cartoon of an Indy driver in his car, talking to his pit crew, "How the hell should I know? Its supposed to go 'Vroom, vroom'. It went 'Tinkle, tinkle, plink.' "
I recall that the C8.5 upgrade came with a bunch of post Gen4 content, which I of course dutifully downloaded and stored. Maybe someday I'll get a round tuit.
:coolhmm:
I looked into it a bit, I hadn't really looked at RAM usage of Carrara with Genesis and Octane since I have 24 Gb, system RAM and only 3Gb VRAM. I can confirm what you are seeing, but the good news is RAM usage doesn't increase at the same rate as you add more Genesis figures. The attached image has one Genesis figure and one Genesis 2 figure. The total RAM allocated to Carrara while rendering was 4.2Gb. I think part of the increase in RAM usage you see when starting the ORVP is Octane (there is no separate process in task manager for Octane), and the data held in system RAM for Octane to generate the scene data for GPU rendering. So I'm guessing that we are seeing the overhead required for both Octane and Carrara under Carrara in task manager. So I would think 16 GB of RAM should be sufficient to created some fairly complex scenes with Carrara and Genesis.
With regard to your scene not opening, first I'm really sorry to hear you lost so much work! I doubt that it is related to the Octane plugin or Genesis as I have probably 50+ scenes with Genesis that use Octane, and I can open all my pre-Octane scenes without problems. Carrara does occasionally botch scene saves. One thing I found out the hard way when I lost about 5 days worth of work, is don't EVER save your scene when the little reminder pops up when closing Carrara. I've had several instances where I did tell Carrara to save, because I wasn't sure if I had saved the latest version, and the scene would not open in Carrara again. I typically do incremental saves, and ensure I have a good working copy of the scene before saving the newer version. It's a pain, but it's much easier to go back and delete the un-needed files than to recreate all of the work on a large scene.
Hope some of this helps.
That sounds like a good tip. I also typically save the scene before exiting, so the "reminder" to save does not come up. Sometimes, even when I want to work on the same scene, I "exit" just to clear the renders, the shaders, etc. I do recall having some scenes that will not reload, probably I did what you're saying and did not realize it. Anyway, thanks.
Also don't use the compression option. That has always been a buggy little bastard. If the save was done using compression, you may be able to recover it by changing the .car file extension to .zip and unzipping it.
Here is a link to a discussion in the Movie Night challenge that pertains to recovering a corrupted, compressed .car file. The discussion begins a few posts previous to this one, but this post and the ones that followed had more information about how to change the suffixes and what un-zipping program works best.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/31940/P45/#476946
Just testing a bit more. This image with one Genesis, and 2 G2F figures took 6.2Gb of RAM while rendering in Octane (according to Task Manager), so I looks like a good rule of thumb might be that it will take a little over 2Gb of system RAM per figure. But, the image only took about 1.7Gb a video ram to render in Octane.
Just to see if Carrara had held on to a few items in RAM of clothing and hair I had tried, but didn't use, I re-loaded the .car file from the image above. Wow! it only took 2.6Gb of RAM before starting the ORVP (Octane Render View Port). After Starting the ORVP the RAM usage jumped up to 4.8Gb - almost a full 2Gb less than before! I know Carrara has a habit of not clearing everything from RAM, but this shows that with Genesis it may be fairly important to save, close Carrara, then reopen to avoid wasting RAM.
I wonder if that's true regardless of Genesis (maybe less so, but still ...) I often find my project with many dozen renders and many dozen shader windows. Just opening a new shader window requires ALL the open shader windows to re-load. :coolmad:
Okay, maybe ten seconds, but its irritating. So I "exit", but "cancel" with the CAR file still open, just the render and shader rooms cleared. No big deal, just a little cleanup.