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Hello,
When I render a scene I am currently working on in Maxwell 2.1 it uses about 2-3 GB of my memory. After some hours this climbs up to 6 GB and then 10. It usually stays at that but if it goes further the computer goes out of memory and a crash usually follows (I "only" have 12 GB installed). I don't recall that this happened with Maxwell 1.x or 2.0 - I certainly had less memory before. Is this a feature or is it a bug? I use Windows 7 64-bit.
Best,

do you have lots of emitters and multilight on? maybe even multilight color mode? that could be responsible for parts of it.

Hello Jakob,

Yes, as macray is commenting, having MultiLight enabled and several emitters need a lot of memory, to store the information from each emitter separately.

In fact, these are the things that can impact your Ram memory:

- resolution
- MultiLight enabled, and the more independent emitters, the more memory is needed to store its information separately
- Color MultiLight
- complexity of geometry, the more polygons in the scene, the more Ram needed to stored them all in memory
- size of textures, the more Mb the textures, the more Ram needed to stored them all in memory

Check all these points to find where you can reduce your memory needs.

Greetings

Dario Lanza

Jakob,

I have notice this also and wondered if it was a memory leak bug?

I ran a render recently where I was rendering a multframe 'animation' i.e. 4 view of the same object from different camera positions. It was only a simple piece of furniture with no multilight and simple studio emitters but as each frame rendered the memory increased instead of being reset before each frame. It was as though a small amount of memory was retained after each frame eventually mounting up to a large amount that cause the PC to complain about a lack of virtual memory!

I certainly hadn't notice this before and it was a relatively simple model that shouldn't have caused my 6GB system any problems.

Thanks for the replies. I only have environment as light but am using color Multilight. That just might be the problem. I really love the multilight-feature though... too bad. Does Multilight cause longer render time as well? I have a lot of polygons and high resolution but I don't think that is the problem as that would (?) make the render use a lot of memory from the start. What happens here is that it starts at 2GB and gradually increases. After 10 hours rendering it uses 11GB.

That's strange, I've never noticed Maxwell increasing memory usage during rendering. It always levels off and remains relatively unchanged for me.

Ok, so I disabled the Multilight and started redering the same scene again. After 20 hours of rendering the problem continues (picture looking good though). Processors at 95-100% and memory use 10.7 GB :O Why does the memory use increase in this manner?

Does this happen with every single scene you render?
I might be wrong, but perhaps this could be a problem of specific scene/geometry or perhaps some material settings.
Just my guess.

If you want to simplify the scene as much as possible while maintaining the problem, you can zip it up and PM me and I'll take a look at it.

Hows this for strange. I was rendering one day, just messing around, not even setting up a scene just rendering straight after import. Half way through a 10min render my computer froze giving me some sort of memory error and crashed. I then could not select anything on the desktop so i did a manual restart, this was the beginning of an on going 6 day problem.

Turned out my computer got infected or something and it worked it's way into maxwell, which started the crash. I then had to send my computer of to tech geeks to remove what they told me was a couple of trojans (prob one) I then got my computer back but he said a couple programs were lost in the cleaning and restore. Maxwell was the very program he was talking about!

So after rebooting my clean running computer I opened up my external to re download maxwell from the down loads I saved from next limit. The second after install INFECTED AGAIN! computer freezes again and wont let me do a thing just like before. I then took my external over to my laptop and scanned the external with my Anti virus. To no surprise once finished my maxwell download files had been removed as infected files.....

Long story not so short I'm now on my 45th hour STRAIGHT of running a maleware sweep on my computer, taking forever because it's one sick puppy! I've now been without my desktop for 6 days.....

Ooops, sounds bad. Please contact me through my profile if you want me to zip the sceene. Very kind btw.

Ok so I've now had my computer in and out of the computer shop twice, both times it worked just fine after (temporarily) but every time I had to reinstall maxwell because it kept getting removed every time they fixed it.....weird right?! So last night I got my computer back for the second time and yet again reinstalled maxwell.

10hrs later my computer is froze up AGAIN! My computer sounds as though its running every program possible and in the bottom right I am now getting a "windows 7 build 7600 This copy of windows is not genuine" and I KNOW it is!!

Edit: My tech guy is telling me that maxwell is somehow raping my system of memory causing all sorts of nasty things to happen! I'm getting memory errors up the wazu! I would appreciate it if someone from maxwell would contact me to resolve this issue as it has already cost me $180 to get what little informatioin I do have!

Thank you.

Whatever your tech guy told you, it's most likely that what is wrong with your system is a combination of one or more of the following factors:

1. bad memory
2. failing PSU
3. failing HD

Did he provide you with any documentation about how he checked these factors? Because he starts to sound pretty silly when he starts trying to blame your software. Maxwell runs just fine on any healthy machine, but as it is one of the most resource-intensive apps you can get, it will uncover any weak spots in your hardware in a real hurry.

Just going on instinct, I'd be looking at the PSU first of all, given your description of the scenario.

JDHill wrote: Just going on instinct, I'd be looking at the PSU first of all, given your description of the scenario.

JD knows his stuff on this count.

Out of curiosity though, what's your CPU? Much to my dismay, I recently discovered that DDR3 ram and modern AMD chips play extremely poorly together unless you get ram certified for the platform.

Well, my system is a HP Z600 straight from factory. The processor is a Xeon 5530. Maxwell (or some Maxwell-depending trojan) is the only program that behaves in the given manor above.