Playblast Memory Leak?

Maya
1

Starting with a freshly opened instance of maya my scene takes up 800mb RAM in WinXP Pro. Each consecutive playblast brings the RAM up. After about 7-10 playblasts, the same maya scene takes up 1.25gb of ram. When it gets up to this level, maya craps out frequently. I have 3gb of ram and a quad-core processor, so I'm not hurting for resources. I've heard though that windows only gives you 2gb for applications.

I've tried flushing undo, turning history off, clearing cache, clearing script editor history(this can free up an astounding amount of ram), and none of these things frees up the ram that was built up during those playblasts. If I run memory -summary; it tells me that Maya is using all this ram, but the elements of the summary don't add up to the amount it's using.

Does anyone have any experience with this? I know large scenes will cripple maya, but there's not much else I can do at this point and it's driving me nuts. I have to close and reopen maya to clear that ram. It'd be nice to set up my playblast script to do whatever it needs to clear free up that RAM after a playblast.

Thanks.

2

What version of maya do you have? Try turning on the /3gb switch which will give maya an extra gig inside windows(google for how to do it). Also you can always move to a 64 bit OS and the 64 bit version of Maya.

3

I'm running 2008.

I already tried the 3GB switch, and Maya still gets unstable when it gets above 1GB of RAM. I've seen the memory climb higher without crashing though, so that's a plus.

I wish I could switch to 64, but this is for work, so I'm doubting they'll do that.

Thanks though.

4

well it appears that something in your scene has a memory leak.. what all have you got going on in there?

5

Well obviously 1.4 is justa bit above 1Gb so that would be the thing why one would want to use the 3GB switch.

Yes i agree the leak is in your maya svcene the playblast itself cant really leak. But yes you can leak mel as much as you want.

Also try switching the unlimitted undo off. I mean if you run mel in expression that changes mayas state you will Wery quickly flood undo full.