Rhino 64x Grasshopper consuming memory

Hey, I've noticed others mentioning this as well but I can't find the thread.

I have noticed that recently when I load grasshopper under 64bit Rhino, memory usage ramps up until the whole system freezes. This is on my laptop with 8GB of RAM.

On a workstation with 32GB of RAM, I posted the behavior below. It starts with me loading Grasshopper, the sudden drop off is when I close Rhino (no difference if i just unload GH).

When I start Rhino and GH again, the same ramp behavior is observed.

Is there a reason for GH to consume about 8GB of memory when no GH file is even loaded?

Rhino

Version 5 SR12 64-bit
(5.12.50810.13095, 08/10/2015)

Version August-27, 2014, 0.9.0076

Plugins

DynamicMass, ghpython, Kangaroo, LunchBox

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Andrew Heumann on May 8, 2016 at 7:22am

I'm speculating wildly here, but I'd be curious if you see any difference if you go to the GrasshopperDeveloperSettings command and uncheck the "COFF loading" box. Every time you launch Grasshopper with this box checked, it has to construct a new AppDomain and load every dll / gha file into memory - this includes both third-party add-ons and built-in libraries (Curve, Surface, Vector, etc). When the box is not checked, it is my understanding that the app loads the dlls directly from disk. I've never known this to cause any issues, but it would be interesting to see if you notice a difference in memory usage with this option toggled.

The screenshot you've uploaded certainly shows an increase in memory usage, but nothing that looks out of the ordinary to me - it loads something into memory and then plateaus. In the scenario you describe where your whole system freezes, do you notice this line continue to go higher and higher?

I tested a bit on my own machine - regardless of setting I don't notice any visible jump in memory usage after loading Grasshopper.

Anyway - I should stop running my mouth and let people who actually have some idea of what they're talking about answer your question :D

Permalink Reply by ng5 Alex on May 8, 2016 at 7:59am

hello Andrew,

i did a test too.no noticeable difference here. but i have only weaverbird folder referenced to this option. should i add the gh components too?

best

alex

Permalink Reply by Andrew Heumann on May 8, 2016 at 8:10am

The folders shown in this dialog don't have anything to do with the mechanism by which components are loaded - any overrides above and beyond the setting are specified in grasshopper preferences.

Permalink Reply by ng5 Alex on May 8, 2016 at 8:11am

ok thank you.

no difference in RAM levels.

Permalink Reply by Tim Chen on May 9, 2016 at 2:40am

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the suggestion.

I unchecked the COFF loading box but noticed no difference in behavior either.

With my laptop freezing. Rhino is occupying all the available memory when I open GH, and it maxes out to 8GB. So it can't go any higher.

When I load GH, does it somehow preload some of the gh definitions? Some of the ones I made have a lot of data in them.

Tim

Permalink Reply by Tim Chen on May 9, 2016 at 3:34am

Okay, I did a bit more testing. Here are the results.

These numbers are taken after allowing enough time for ramping and are stable.

3.72 GB - nothing open
4.07 GB - open Rhino
9.19 GB - load Grasshopper (no files)
26.1 GB - load AdjacencyCounter.ph (using a random definition by Andrew here, just in case mine are problematic)
26.1 GB - after running GrasshopperUnloadPlugin (after GH is unloaded, the memory doesn't change)

~9.0 GB - after loading Grasshopper again (a drop after GH is loaded...)

I am really confused.

Permalink Reply by Ralf Lindemann on August 25, 2016 at 1:05pm

Hi Tim,

Did you manage to sort out your memory issue?

I've got the same problem here. I've uninstalled all the GH plugins and UserObjects. But memory still ramps up to around 6GB when I start GH.

Ralf

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on August 25, 2016 at 1:47pm

It is unexpected that memory would increase so significantly without anything happening, but it is normal for memory to go up and up for a long time. Grasshopper is 'managed' code, meaning that the thing in charge of allocating, assigning and freeing memory is the .NET Garbage Collector. The GC tends not attempt to free memory until it feels there's a need to do so (freeing/defragmenting memory is time consuming, so not a good idea to do it all the time for no good reason). If you have lots of unused RAM on a 64-bit system, you may go on for a long time before there's a drop.

On my system (64-bit windows 10) I start out at 6 GB, Rhino adds 0.3 GB, Grasshopper adds 0.1 GB (no 3rd party plugins loaded except for Python) and usage remains flat unless I start doing stuff.

The only thing that happens all the time in GH is that it keeps checking the plugin folders to see if anything got installed. I'm not quite sure how this process could eat up more and more memory, although I guess it is possible it tries to load some file over and over again and never succeeding?

RSS