I am working a cellular automata simulation that i set up, i am trying to run it for 500 frames, but it always crashes in the middle around 300 plus frame. The memory allocation error msg will appear and houdini will crash. How can i solve this ? thanks

Buy more memory.

Or don't cache to memory and write out your simulation instead.

Quite a few of us have been having the same problem as Kianwee. Is the current behavior a bug - I would have though that if memory runs out then Houdini could write to a temporary file instead… ?

Another related question - under:
Edit > Preferences > Objects and Geometry
I see two tabs, called SOP Cache and Obj Cache

I am wondering if changing these settings will have any effect on this ‘Memory Allocation’ problem?

And finally, that for your suggestion Ratmann - how do you write out the simulation? I remember reading it somewhere, but can't track it down.

Patrick

yes, i encountered similar problem when opening two houdini sessions in “windows xp home edition” installed on an iMac 3.33GHz via Bootcamp.

the total memory usable for this xp on the iMac is around 2.5G.

I manage to cache the memory explicitly so that each frame is save as a .sim file , u have to tick the cache explicit tab and specify a file path for example $HIP/simfile/cache$SF.sim . SO the simulation is explicity save and it can be use the next time u open the file, I hope this will be able to cache at the point where houdini crashes, still trying it out now

A windows 32 bit machine will crash out when memory goes over 1Gb, sometimes you can get it up around 1.3 but that's your lot. You can slightly improve the situation by using the /3Gb in your boot.ini but that might make other software unstable.
The best thing to do is switch to a 64 bit operating system then that issue goes away.

Thanks for the replies

I think the 32 bit issue explains a lot. But for the moment, we will not be able to switch to 64 bit. So in the mean time, is there anything that we can do to make the crash more graceful on the 32b bit machines… ?

Nothing I can think of other than the /3Gb switch. Just keep task manager up watch the memory usage, and save often.