For the last few days, I was troubleshooting my system because I wasn't able to write a moderately sized USD File through a USD ROP in LOPs.
Long story short: After disabling everything I realized that Houdini was still crashing not because of faulty memory or reaching the physical RAM limit, but the virtual memory limit.
I haven't changed anything on my system for a couple of months but recently have been running into memory allocation issues constantly.
Now I wonder if this was a Windows issue (maybe it reduced the virtual memory size without me knowing) or if Houdini commits too much?
When writing something to Disk the committed memory starts out roughly double what's currently in the physical RAM. But then it seems to add a GB every one or two frames. This seems somewhat excessive as the actually used memory was growing by roughly 300 MB a frame and I wasn't able to utilize more than 63 GBs of my 128 GBs before crashing.
This is a screenshot from my task manager:
(This is with the increased virtual memory. The RAM is usually faster but I disabled X-AMP while troubleshooting)
Again, I am not sure where the issue is exactly but I remember being able to use all of my 128Gbs without having to increase the virtual memory just a couple of weeks ago and then it suddenly started with constant memory allocation errors.
Maybe the next time somebody writes something to disk they could watch their Task Manager to see if they notice the same behavior as I am? Or is your virtual memory bigger by default?