I was working on a scene, at about 46% system resources. I opened a new empty scene and it still only showed 46% so then I purged memory but no difference.
quitting and restarting, same empty scene at 86% resources free.
Love esther

There is something going on with Vue 8 and resources. I'm not sure why, but I'm seeing about a twenty percent increase in resource usage over Vue 7 for the same scene. Also, the scene takes much longer to load in Vue 8. I thought maybe all of the new display features were taking the toll, but when I turned them off or down, the resource expenditure didn't decrease much. Granted, the scene is pretty large.  

I hope Vue isn't being geared toward those with 16 gigs of Ram and higher these days. It's getting to the point where it will be worthless to upgrade without buying a new computer, os and video card. 

 don't worry about the RAM - I have 16 G and I still have that problem.  Maybe the video card?

I don't know why the resources were retained when you shut Vue down, but I was led to believe that the "purge memory" button isn't supposed to work on 64-bit systems. If true, the fact that Vue keeps including it in the 64-bit versions is a mystery. However, I've found that "purge memory" will free up 4% of resources on my 64-bit system in Vue 8. 

 i have 32 bit

Last I heard, you need a 64-bit system to use more than 4 gigs of RAM. Of course, this doesn't explain why you can't free resources, but it might give a reason why resources are low, despite your 16 gigs of RAM.

Is there a system that can use more than four gigs of RAM at 32 bits? 

 I just think it's weird that I changed to another scene and the resources stayed low.  they weren't that low but they weren't as high as normal either.

That is weird. Even so, it would be to your advantage to upgrade your OS to a 64-bit system. 12 gigs of your RAM is currently unusable . 

 I have theOS but my macpro is an early one that cannot do 64 bit
Love esther

It's not that purging memory doesn't work in 64bit OS, it's just that 64 bit Windows does a better job at freeing / defragmenting memory than 32 bit windows, so purging memory doesn't do much, if anything at all. I don't know about the Mac.
Now abot Ram, a 32bit Mac OS can allocate up to4 gigs of ram to Vue, unlike 32bit Windows that can only allocate 2. Having 12gigs is useless though..

 okay, thanks. 

Is anyone finding that the plant editor is eating resources?   I was fixing all the trees like I always have to do and although only loading 1 tree at a time then deleting it before loading the next, my resources dropped to critical level and a message poopped up suggesting a less complex scene??? 

Last night I was working on a scene that required some tree editing and each  time my resources plummeted while using the editor but amazingly recovered after it had been closed.  However, eventually (fortunately after a recent save) my whole system froze and I had to pull the plug.

I've also noticed that if the resources have dropped to an unreasonable level I have to completely close Vue and reopen it to get them back.

Anyway, if anyone could see how their systems perform with frequent usage of the plant editor I'd appreciate any feedback 

No problem here, Gill, 8 xSt on Win7 64bit, using a standard (crawling bush) and high def plant (dying tree).

Just out of interest, I did some quick tests using Windows 7's resource monitor. This is on a 64-bit system with 8Gb. The results were:

Before running Vue, memory usage was 1318Mb used, 6730 free

When Vue was run the respective figures were: 1465 used, 6582 free, with 88% resources free according to Vue.

I created a single standard terrain, enlarged it to the size of the world grid, loaded the 'Cold Mountain' eco and reduced the scale of all the objects in the eco. Vue gave its standard warning that this might fail due to a lack of memory. I said do it anyway and got memory usage figures of 2897Mb used, 5028 free, and 78% resources free according to Vue.

Deleting the terrain gave figures of 2724 used, 5212 free, 79% resources free - some difference but not much.

Purge memory had no discernible effect. Closing the scene and opening a new default one gave figures of 2629 used, 5377 free, 81% resources free.

Closing Vue allowed Win7 to reclaim all the memory used.

Now, I don't know if this is a memory leak or what, but it's not very good if closing a scene doesn't automatically release all the resources the app used in that scene.

I haven't tried the plant editor - I'll give it a go when I have a moment if no-one else does it before then.

the memory leak is a known issue of the 32 bit version (not the 64 bit) of vue 8 build 47443. It is being addressed by technical support and should be resolved by the next service update (very soon I hope).

Yes - just to note, I'm running Vue on a 64-bit windows 7 system. Leak (if it is one) is there too.

I'm 64 bit too

Quote - No problem here, Gill, 8 xSt on Win7 64bit, using a standard (crawling bush) and high def plant (dying tree).

Tnx Bruno....

Just doing a couple with an empty scene when the programmes just loaded isn't so bad.  Do 10 or so or have a fully loaded WIP scene then try to edit a few trees.  That's when the big probs happen for me

Quote - Just out of interest, I did some quick tests using Windows 7's resource monitor. This is on a 64-bit system with 8Gb. The results were:

Of course I can't know Vue's internals, but it's quite possible that some internal memory structures get only initialized/allocated on demand when needed, and freed when Vue is closed.
Downside is that no one else can use this memory until Vue is closed, advantage is that memory becomes less fragmented and things are slightly faster.

Oh, Ok, Gill, I will try with a more elaborate scene.

I had a similar problem with low memory.  My system crashed twice, and I had to reopen it twice, with less memory available each time.  Closing Vue and opening it again to an empty scene didn't bring back the memory at all.

I happened to look at my task manager and saw that Vue8INF was running THREE times- no wonder there was no memory!  I closed the Vue I had open and rebooted my computer.  That cleared the three applications off there and gave me back full memory.  I probably could have just ended the tasks in the task manager, too.

Now whenever I have a crash, which is often, I check the task manager and make sure Vue is truly shut down.  What a fiasco!  There really needs to be a fix for this soon.