I am rendering about 100k frames using an ini file of the same object type, each
having a random (in a box) configuration of the object, no of objects, camera
location, light source, viewing angle etc. Issue is RAM consumption increases
monotonically. I don't know what garbage value isn't being thrown. Is there a
macro to delete stuff manually at the end of a .pov file, or any other good
practices? (new to povray here)

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Am 05.05.2016 um 16:22 schrieb ratneshmadaan:
> I am rendering about 100k frames using an ini file of the same object type, each
> having a random (in a box) configuration of the object, no of objects, camera
> location, light source, viewing angle etc. Issue is RAM consumption increases
> monotonically. I don't know what garbage value isn't being thrown. Is there a
> macro to delete stuff manually at the end of a .pov file, or any other good
> practices? (new to povray here)

What version of POV-Ray are you using, and on what operating system?

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clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Am 05.05.2016 um 16:22 schrieb ratneshmadaan:
> > I am rendering about 100k frames using an ini file of the same object type, each
> > having a random (in a box) configuration of the object, no of objects, camera
> > location, light source, viewing angle etc. Issue is RAM consumption increases
> > monotonically. I don't know what garbage value isn't being thrown. Is there a
> > macro to delete stuff manually at the end of a .pov file, or any other good
> > practices? (new to povray here)
>
> What version of POV-Ray are you using, and on what operating system?

Crap. I rebuilt povray on a server, and this time I used the master branch,
instead of 3.7 stable branch. Ubuntu 14.04. Could that be the issue?

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Am 05.05.2016 um 18:28 schrieb ratneshmadaan:
> clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
>> Am 05.05.2016 um 16:22 schrieb ratneshmadaan:
>>> I am rendering about 100k frames using an ini file of the same object type, each
>>> having a random (in a box) configuration of the object, no of objects, camera
>>> location, light source, viewing angle etc. Issue is RAM consumption increases
>>> monotonically. I don't know what garbage value isn't being thrown. Is there a
>>> macro to delete stuff manually at the end of a .pov file, or any other good
>>> practices? (new to povray here)
>>
>> What version of POV-Ray are you using, and on what operating system?
> 
> Crap. I rebuilt povray on a server, and this time I used the master branch,
> instead of 3.7 stable branch. Ubuntu 14.04. Could that be the issue?

Generally I'd expect the current master branch to have /fewer/ memory
leaks than the 3.7 stable. But there's always the possibility that I
might be mistaken.

If the increase in RAM consumption proses a serious problem, you may
consider rendering the animation in multiple batches, using the +SFn and
+EFn command-line switches.

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Am 2016-05-05 13:12, also sprach clipka:

> Generally I'd expect the current master branch to have /fewer/ memory
> leaks than the 3.7 stable. But there's always the possibility that I
> might be mistaken.

I can't comment on the /fewer/ than 3.7, but the latest pvengine*.exe 
leaks pretty bad.  I mentioned once that my workflow includes exiting 
and restarting povwin every couple hundred to 1000 frames rendered.    I 
notice about a 50-100KB leak per frame rendered.  Even when the render 
job is done is doesn't give back the memory.  After povwin consumes 2GB 
of leaked memory, it gets pretty sluggish. (I have 16GB of memory.)
For production, I use povconsole which renders one frame per call, so I 
don't care about leaks there.

I was always a little surprised that Jaime didn't weigh in on this 
issue. I figured with the heavy complicated scenes he makes, he must 
notice this. (Although I've never heard him complain about anything. ;) )
-- 
dik

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Am 06.05.2016 um 03:25 schrieb dick balaska:

> I was always a little surprised that Jaime didn't weigh in on this
> issue. I figured with the heavy complicated scenes he makes, he must
> notice this. (Although I've never heard him complain about anything. ;) )

From what I see, Jaime is mainly into stills, where leaks are certainly
less of a problem, even when the scenes are much more complex.

Also, any observations that might help identify the leaks are more than
welcome. I'd expect most leaks to be specific to the use of particular
features rather than constant per-frame overhead.

My understanding from your description is that memory consumption not
only rises during animation rendering, but remains high even after the
final frame has finished, right?

If you could provide me with a scene that is guaranteed to exhibit lots
of leakage in the most recent Windows binaries and isn't too slow to
render, maybe along with a bit of technical information on how much
leakage you observe, I'd appreciate that as well. I don't do any serious
animations work with POV-Ray myself, so I have only very simple test
scenes to go by, which do not seem to demonstrate any increase in the
memory footprint that would stand out among the normal random
fluctuations seen in the task manager.

Feel free to email any helpful animation scenes to "christoph", at
"lipka-koeln" in the "de" domain.

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> From what I see, Jaime is mainly into stills, where leaks are
> certainly less of a problem, even when the scenes are much more
> complex.

   Yes, I did very few animations, but none recently. With stills I never
noticed anything strange about memory usage. I will try some of my old
animations this weekend, to see if I can confirm this...

--
jaime

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Am 2016-05-05 22:50, also sprach clipka:
>
> If you could provide me with a scene that is guaranteed to exhibit lots
> of leakage in the most recent Windows binaries and isn't too slow to
> render, maybe along with a bit of technical information on how much
> leakage you observe, I'd appreciate that as well. I don't do any serious
> animations work with POV-Ray myself, so I have only very simple test
> scenes to go by, which do not seem to demonstrate any increase in the
> memory footprint that would stand out among the normal random
> fluctuations seen in the task manager.

My art is all csg spheres and boxes, cones and torii. No radiosity or 
modern features.  I will whip something off. (Maybe I can put 1000 
spheres *behind* the camera).

I never thought of the leak as animation specific, just the act of 
calling the renderer, which is why I thought of Jaime.  Maybe it is 
related to +SF10 +EF20.



-- 
dik

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Am 06.05.2016 um 21:32 schrieb dick balaska:
> Am 2016-05-05 22:50, also sprach clipka:
>>
>> If you could provide me with a scene that is guaranteed to exhibit lots
>> of leakage in the most recent Windows binaries and isn't too slow to
>> render, maybe along with a bit of technical information on how much
>> leakage you observe, I'd appreciate that as well. I don't do any serious
>> animations work with POV-Ray myself, so I have only very simple test
>> scenes to go by, which do not seem to demonstrate any increase in the
>> memory footprint that would stand out among the normal random
>> fluctuations seen in the task manager.
> 
> My art is all csg spheres and boxes, cones and torii. No radiosity or
> modern features.  I will whip something off. (Maybe I can put 1000
> spheres *behind* the camera).

What -- no functions? No macros? No arrays? No spline-based movement? ;)

I wouldn't be surprised if the memory leaks turned out to be related not
so much to /what/ you populate your scene with, but /how/.

> I never thought of the leak as animation specific, just the act of
> calling the renderer, which is why I thought of Jaime.  Maybe it is
> related to +SF10 +EF20.

Nah, the +SF and +EF options don't have much of an effect on the way
POV-Ray operates; it just changes how it computes the frame_number and
clock, that's all.

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> I wouldn't be surprised if the memory leaks turned out to be related
> not so much to /what/ you populate your scene with, but /how/.

   First, let see if I understand this correctly: in an animation where
there are the same exact number of objects, and only some objects move,
the memory consumption should stay stable from the first frame, isn't?

   If so, I see a little increase from frame to frame on a test I did:
along 1000 frames, the memory increased some 300K. And in this special
case, there is only /what/, not any /how/... the movement was calculated
with the bullet physics playground, and as such there are no
calculations, no functions, no macros, no splines. Only a different
include for each frame with the same objects using different matrix values.

--
jaime

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