Hey,


I got the weird situation that Houdini is constantly crashing on a certain frame. It says there isn't enough memory available although only 30 of 64 GB are actually used. Any idea?

Maybe you have mis-matched memory chips? This did a number on my Houdini experience about a year ago. I kept getting crashes. The thing is, I purchased additional memory to the same spec as my existing memory, I was adding more. However, after inspecting the actual values of my new system memory using CPU-Z [cpuid.com] I discovered that the vendor was actually selling slower memory as if it were faster memory. Check if all your memory chips are running at the same speed.

Eventually I just purchased a matched set of Crucial 32GB memory and my problems went away.

Well, I bought exactly the same memory from exactly the same seller (Alternate). I just got a crash with only 7 GB used in the scene. Tested an other scene and could sim considerably more particles and fill up the memory quite good. Got the feeling its something about the file. Maybe due to a Houdini update.

Even if you purchased the same memory, you still have to inspect it with CPU-Z. I did the same thing, I purchased from a vendor named AddOn and out of the four “matched” chips they sent me I got three different speeds that were speced all the same on the label.

With AddOn it was intentional mis-labeling of an inferior product sold as a superior product at a higher price. Most people never inspect their ram chips and yes the ram chips do come up and function at mis-matched speeds. But with Houdini you really need to inspect those values to eliminate that as a possibility.

This is why we need better import inspectors at the borders it really is a free for all in the world market and there are tech rip-offs going on.

So I used CPU Z, because houdini keeps crashing. When I let a big sim run over night I know that it won't be finished. Thats pretty annoying. Made some screenshots but I don't quite know what to look for.

Activate the SPD TAB and you will see a more detailed breakdown on a per-slot basis. Click the drop down and review the speed of each chip in each memory slot. They should be matched. If the speeds are not matched, that could be the problem and you may want to set your RAM speed (in the motherboard bios setup) to the lowest reported speed.

Overall your numbers seem a little strange to me but I am more of an AMD guy and you have an i7 chip. Because of the voltage and your core speed I would guess your motherboard has some kind of sleeping or low power throttling feature enabled. You may want to review your motherboard handbook to and read up on what features are available.

You have an i7 @3Gghz but the clock speed is only running at 1.2Ghz. The ram seems to be running @ 1.3Ghz.

The multiplier reports 12x but shows it can go as high as 42x. That is how the throttling features are often implemented. As a multiplier-shift when the CPU is not under load. This throttling can also affect the Core Voltage value as well, the voltage will be lowered to the chip when not under load or under extreme heat conditions. Fail safes to protect the chip.

These throttling features are nice for consumer based products but for real production you just want the machine to run as fast as possible all the time. Sometimes these throttling features are renamed to consumer friendly titles like “Cool & Quite” to keep the CPU from getting to hot or the fan from running all the time.

Try running your sim with CPU-Z open an observe the values.

I checked the individual RAM slots and they all seam to run on the same values. I don't know how it works in detail but you have to multiply the RAM frequency * 2 to get the actual value. So 1,3 means 2.6 GHZ. Don't hit me if I'm talking too much bullshit Anyway, the RAM isn't running at variable speed, only the CPU. Actually I don't want the CPU to run at 100% power ALL the time. I do a lot of GPU rendering too and my two cards are producing enough hot air. Overclocked the CPU core by core. Overall temp doesn't exceed 65°, watercooled it etc. during rendering the CPU stays quite constant at 100% usage and shows no instability, even while rendering for days. I also have no problems with speed at all. Just the message that there isn't enougn RAM available when there are 30 gigs free is so weird. I still got the feeling its something with houdini. Have to find a programm that stress tests my system. The last one only reserved 25 Gb of memory for testing purposes. Not enough to see how the rest works.

Got a little screenshot from memtest. Is it normal that it can't test all available memory? I got windows 10 professional.

At this point I would have to ask are you running a 32 bit version of Windows Professional?

No, 64.

Hmm..
If you can post your scene, I'll give it a try on my system. But the fact that memtest is having problems indicates there may be something wrong in the memory allocation system which could cause Houdini or any program to crash.

Kombustor [geeks3d.com] is a GPU stress tester but I think some of the scenarios allow you to increase particles which fills up memory. It's free.

Maybe it is power supply related? How many watts is your power supply rated for?