Grasshopper consumes huge amount of memory after it is started.

It seems that the memory usage will jump significantly once Grasshopper is open in Rhino, as shown in the memory use chart below. The entire computer becomes very very slow. Once GH and Rhnio are closed, the memory use will drop to normal level.

may I ask how this happens and how to reduce the memory use by GH?

Thank you!

After GH is open in Rhino, memory use rises up to available limit:

Memory drops once GH and Rhino are closed:

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Armin Seltz on September 13, 2016 at 3:33am

Is this with no file open, or when you open a Rhino and Grasshopper file? If it is with no file open, then something is definitely wrong. Usually Rhino consumes around 1Gb of Ram for me and some more if I open a large file, but certainly not 11Gb.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on September 13, 2016 at 3:58am

There have been reports, but I haven't been able to reproduce it at all. On my box Rhino6 + GH1 level out at 260MB memory use and do not consume more until I start to actually generate data. However I'm running a DEBUG version of Rhino6 so it's not representative.

Do you have any plug-ins loaded? Are all your files on a local disc or do you have some files/plugins on a network drive?

Permalink Reply by Grasshope on September 13, 2016 at 4:23am

Dear Armin and David, thank you very much for your reply!

The following charts may help to explain the situation I'm encountering:

1. this is the memory use after Rhino is open:

2. once Grasshopper is open, the memory use jump quickly and stay at high level, even if I didn't open any GH file:

3. once I close GH (with Rhino still running), the memory use drop a bit, and rise again, but not to the high level as before:

4. once I close Rhino, the memory use will drop to normal level:

5. the GH components I'm using are installed locally on my computer:

I'm not sure if this is a problem with my computer in particular, as this issue only happened a few days ago. I'm using Rhino 5 SR7 64bit in Windows 7 Pro and the latest version of GH on my computer for quite a while with no obvious speed issue, and I didn't upgrade them recently.

Hope you can kindly advise!

Thank you!

- Ji

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on September 13, 2016 at 5:05am

It is pretty peculiar, I'm especially confused by the drop in memory usage when the window is closed. Closing the GH window doesn't actually do anything except hide it, so if the memory usage drops after that, it would indicate it's somehow related to just drawing the GH interface.

On the other hand the number of Handles used increases only by about 200 from only-rhino to rhino-and-gh, which points away from an interface problem. Sigh.

I have no idea what's causing it, and in a way it doesn't matter because I can't release a version of GH for Rhino5 any more. If this is still happening in Rhino6, then we need to look into it but this is beyond fixing.

Permalink Reply by Grasshope on September 14, 2016 at 4:19am

Thank you, David!

I have reinstalled both Rhino and Grasshopper, and the problem is still there: memory use jumps quickly and remains at high level once GH is open...

May I ask if there are other things I can try to solve this problem?

Much obliged!

- Ji

Permalink Reply by Armin Seltz on September 14, 2016 at 4:47am

Could you temporarily move all custom components/user objects to a different location, just to make sure this also happens with a totally clean install of GH with no plugins.

Reinstalling GH will probably not completely reset all the custom user folders or some settings somewhere. If this is still happening what you could try next is to create a new user in Windows 7 and install Rhino and Grasshopper there, so it wont have any links to previous settings etc. and see if its still happening.

Permalink Reply by Grasshope on September 14, 2016 at 8:34pm

Dear Armin and David, thank you very much!

Following Armin's advice, I used a different user to login my computer, and now there is no such memory consumption issue when using both Rhino and GH. See image blow.

I'm not sure why there is such a problem when using my original user account. Can you kindly advise if there is a way to "refresh" a user account?

Thank you!

Permalink Reply by Armin Seltz on September 15, 2016 at 1:51am

Ok, thats good, so at least its not something about your computer (hardware fault) or the Windows installation. Still very difficult to pinpoint what could be causing it.

I am not aware of a way to "refresh" a user account. In this case it might be easier to just transfer over the important stuff to the new user account and then start using that, depending on how much you have already set up your account.

What you could try is using Windows Easy Transfer (works up until Windows 7 I think) and use it to create a duplicate of your account. If you are lucky it will copy only important things and not cause the memory bug. Worth a try.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on September 15, 2016 at 2:52am

All your plugins are still there on the other account?

Permalink Reply by Grasshope on September 17, 2016 at 12:14am

Thank you , Armin and Davide!

Yes, David, all the GH plugins installed on the problematic user account are still available on the new user account I'm using.

For the time being, I'll use this account for the work ...

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on September 14, 2016 at 8:11am

Step 1. you should definitely update to the latest Rhino5 Service release.

Permalink Reply by Grasshope on November 10, 2016 at 2:06am

Dear David,

I'm having this Rhino+GH consuming a lot of RAM after GH is open, again, after I shift to the new user account on my computer after a few weeks during which I didn't encounter such issue as indicated here.

This time, it seems that GH is keep alternating between showing up in the application list in the Task Manager and then disappearing again and again, and GH is never able to be fully activated. (see the images below)

This status continued while consuming almost all the RAM, and I cannot operate either Rhino or GH:

Once I force to stop Rhino, the RAM use drop to normal level:

May I ask if you have any suggestions on how to debug this issue? Is it related to what Andrew mentioned that GH is trying to load some of the previous large size project files for preview or something?

Hope you can kindly advise!

Thank you very much!

-Ji