hello,

everytime i use mantra over network with a big parallel machine it constantly eats more and
more ram until the machine has nothing left. after that it begins eating the swap…

i use: mantra -H bigone,bigone,bigone,bigone… dependent on the machine's cpu number.

happens with 5.5 and current…

ideas?

thanks

Mantra acheives its parallelism through multi-processing, not multi-threading. This means that the memory usage is generally (and roughly)

(#instances) x (the memory taken by 1 instance)

Try rendering with only 1 processor on that machine (rendering 4x faster is no good if it never completes ).

Multiprocessing = multiple instances of the same application working on the same data set
Multithreading = one instance of an application working on the same data set with several threads. Much of the code and data isn't duplicated per thread.

Multithreading has less memory overhead, but is more difficult to implement than multiprocessing. So both have their uses.

hello,

thanks but i know that.

the problem is not the general amount of ram but it eats more and more ram even if all
stuff must be loaded.
not so with single or dual machines but on the big one (16cpu).