Pagefile swapping for no apparent reason

[remydrh]

I tried searching but for some reason I don't see a specific way to address this.

I have an issue where Vray will begin swapping from the pagefile for reasons I don't understand. The machine has 32GB RAM and Max will only use small amounts, 1-2GB, but the virtual memory size is large, up to 20GB sometimes and Windows begins to increase the pagefile size to accommodate the process.

Does Vray natively use an available percentage? I see a setting for 400MB dynamic memory, this seems low. I am new to some of these processes in Vray and I'm hoping to increase the performance.

Where should I look?

Thanks

[vlado]

Which operating system are you using? All page swapping is performed by the operating system; V-Ray has no control whatsoever over which parts of the physical memory are paged out to disk.

Best regards,
Vlado

[remydrh]

Windows XP Pro 64-bit. I know Windows memory fragmentation is fairly bad, but with 32GB RAM I didn't expect it to swap out that much memory for no apparent reason.

The scenes are geometry heavy. Extremely. It's a continuous mesh so I can't instance it.

[plastic_]

probably it would be a good idea to disable the page file then...

[vlado]

You can also check that the bitmap pager is disabled - it can perform disk operations too, in scenes with large bitmaps.

Best regards,
Vlado

[remydrh]

No bitmaps are being used.

I'm looking into why windows is doing this. On one machine I have Vray using 1.5GB and the rest gets paged into 33GB. It has a tendency to send Windows into kernal panic and I have to reboot it or it simply locks up, same difference.

At what point does Vray flush the memory by default and can I change that? I can't seem to find docs on that here but I might be looking in the wrong place. To Vray's credit, it can trudge through and finish, but I want to make its life a bit easier. And a side question: is Vray raytracing always by default or are primary rays scanline?

[Morbid Angel]

is Vray raytracing always by default or are primary rays scanline?

yes, vray always raytraces.

If you dont have any textures/displacement/proxies you could attempt to render this scene with mr and see if that same problem occurs. If so, most likely windows is not configured properly.
I have similar problems on machines that have a lot of ram. For example the rule is that the pagefile has to be about same or twice the size of ram, so in my case it was 32 gb (16 gb of ram) but mahcine would swap to disk like mad, even without the use of ram. This is however not vray related.
My machine at home has only 4gb of ram and when working with scenes that require to use all 4, it does not swap that much at all.

[remydrh]

I cannot render with mr, I would've tried that by now but we use a proprietary system that does not translate to anything but Vray. It makes it more difficult to track down.

Having said that. . .I think that it's that software that may be paging the memory but I haven't been able to check that just yet. I had thought it relied on Vray to do the management but this is the first time we've made the software work this hard so none of us are sure quite yet.

As for paging, the system partition is small and makes it hard to increase or move the pagefile. I can move it to another drive but that also runs into a potential space problem. We can generate over 10TB in data a day.

[vlado]

At what point does Vray flush the memory by default and can I change that? I can't seem to find docs on that here but I might be looking in the wrong place.

V-Ray does not itself flush anything to disk. The only objects that are related to the disk are VRayProxy objects, but these are handled by V-Ray itself, they don't go into the page file. There is a "dynamic memory limit" setting in the System rollout that you can increase, but it is likely that it will not change anything.

Best regards,
Vlado