Finally making the upgrade. It seems that I can now run Houdini 64-bit these days.

This of course, is A) Awesome, and B) Confusing…

My question is about memory usage. On 32bit even with 4 gigs of ram a Houdini session would never grab more than 2 gigs. As one would expect.

Now on the 64 bit machine, Houdini seems to jump at the opportunity for 4 gigs, greedily. And then as soon as another process comes in, the Houdini is moved into swap. Am I looking at this correct, have others noticed the behavior? And if so, is there a way to calm Houdini memory usage down. Maybe some sort of flag from the startup?


cheers,
-j

64 bit has a few obvious positive benefits, but some notable downsides. You will use more memory with 64 over 32, I suspect that's what you're seeing. You always want to juice up the memory on your 64 bit machines, give yourself lots of headroom…

Cheers,

J.C.

Yup. I've got 6gb at home, and 8 here at work.

I was under the impression that 4 is the minimum you would want on a 64bit machine.

Hmm … I have Vista64, 2 proc machine with 4GB of RAM. Never had any issue with swap.

It's all about what you're doing it, and how. I'm a serious control freak when it comes to computer resources - I've always got something(taskbar applet on linux, my g15 gaming keyboard display on windoze) that is feeding me info on resource use. You need to manage what you're doing, or be prepared to sit there watching things swap. I've seen users have HD flipbooks open that they've forgotten about then getting upset when Houdini starts swapping during a DOPs sim. In this case, I just think Jacob needs to get used to the 64 bit memory footprint. I know I had to adapt. I'm running 8G/8 cores which, this month, is my idea of an ideal workstation for FX work. Once i7's are out there later this month, here we go again.

Cheers,

J.C.

I am a resources control freak too. I use conky:
http://conky.sourceforge.net/ [conky.sourceforge.net]

I have disabled swap in linux … if it dont fit into memory, is time to optimize the scene.
If you cant optimize, buy more RAM.

You're more hardassed than me!

I admire that.

Cheers,

J.C.

There are definite growing pains. What did it for me was running some DOP sims local.

Looks like I will be investing in more RAM!

cheers,
-j

I dunno… some of those conky scripts out there use up to 10% CPU constantly, which freaks me out. It is very pretty though.

Yeah, I'm always a little paranoid about that - the Schrodinger's Cat thing where you affect it by observing it - I just quickly dloaded conky for a wheeze and it didn't appear to have any significant impact in default state, but I'll probably just stick with my applet.

Cheers,

J.C.

I modified the original conky script for a horizontal layout, less intrusive.

Is really nice to see the how quad four cores works.