My apologies if anyone also saw this on the Daz forum, which seems to have but a handful of posts anymore :-(

Anyhow, I copied what was there if anyone has (useful!) suggestions...

Greetings. I’ve been working with what I think is a memory handicap for quite awhile now and am finally reaching out for a little insight.

When I first came in with DS3 32 bit, I understood that it had a cap of 2GB memory use. I then upgraded to DS3A about 6 months after that, and memory never seemed to be an issue.

Fast forward to the present, I’m working with 12GB of fast DDR3 memory on a great and modern rig, and I ALWAYS run into what feels like a memory leak. Studio slows down further and further after working for a few hours, and eventually it gets to a point where it’s nearly unresponsive. However, in Task Manager, it shows Studio using ~1.01GB of RAM.

Is there a massive amount of memory leak going on, or is there a way to uncap Studio to take advantage of more memory??

Win 7 64 Ultimate
AMD Phenom II 1095T Black hex core
12GB HyperX Ram @2000mhz
(2) GTS 450’s in SLI
Running all the latest drivers
Studio 4 Pro 4.0.3.47

*Someone did suggest upgrading to 4.5, but that's a no go for me as I'm a heavy Reality/Lux user for which 4.5 is not compatible as of this writing.

That is a tough question, are you using DAS 4.0 64 bit, sorry but 4.0.3.47 does not mean much to me?? Are you overclocking uour CPU?? are you over clocking your video cards??

I subscribe to the DAS Hardware Forum and did not get a notice of your question.

Quote - That is a tough question, are you using DAS 4.0 64 bit, sorry but 4.0.3.47 does not mean much to me?? Are you overclocking uour CPU?? are you over clocking your video cards??

I subscribe to the DAS Hardware Forum and did not get a notice of your question.

It is 64 bit. 4.0.3.47 was the last release before 4.5. I'll have to go digging in my emails but I know it got submitted somewhere.

I have OC'ed my cpu and memory at various times, but currently and last night they were at factory values.

Yes I have always had this problem it seems to be the nature of DAZ.  This is my way of handeling this and it works very well:  Cut down on the number of renders you do, I did alot of them to make sure I will get what I am looking for.  Each render is kept in memory and after a time it will start re-writeing them starting with the first render and each render keeps everything you have in the scen.  Work in steps and save your scen to disk offten.  Build your scen before adding your Characters.  If possable, pose and dress them  in a new wildow and save.  A lot will depend on how complex your scen is,  the more you have in 1 scem the more your puter must add and DAZ has to hold. One other thing I do when it starts to slowdown I will take a break and shut DAZ down thous clearing all saved renders.  Yes  I spend 8 to 16 hours a day with DAZ, I am always building art and loving it.  Though I spend a lot of time in the program I know little about it and for me it is just what I need, I load, pose , render 80% of my time, the rest of my time is just playing and having a lot of fun creating new characters.

You've got some good tips in there, PoppaC! I spend several hours at a time as well, and I think I figured out what the deal was.

Typically I do a test render or two, and when the poses and such are up to snuff, I export to Lux via Reality.

Reality and Lux handle massive geometry with ease, whereas Studio does not, as it seems. This scene had very little in memory, but I think the poly count is what killed it, added with a V4 with SubD. Oops... 

I check task manager randomly to see what all is going on, and Studio does have a habit of running in 'Ghost' mode, where you've shut studio down yet it lingers in memory, sometimes up to 600MB even when you closed it a long, long time ago.

ok i'm running a win7 comp 64 bit and a 32 bit DA4 pro last release b4 4.5 with 8 gig ddr3 ram dual 2.1 big processor and a 500gb hdd with 1tb exthd all my content is ( other than genesis) on the 1tb exthd and i havent had much issues with mem lag or leak.  although that doesnt mean i am special or maybe it does but the more background progs you have running on your system does hinder the usage of your mem expecially if you dont have graphics card specific mem ( graphics card onboard mem). windows is notorious for using mem that you cant find out where its being used so is possible that you have more than half your int hdd occupied with your programming and content.  this in it`s own would slow your preformance as well as needing to clean your registry and defragging and optimising your hdd and maybe even defragging your hdd registry.  auslogics has free programs on cnet.downloads.com for registry cleaner defragger and registry defragger that could and most likely will speed your usage and minimize your mem leakage.

Quote - ok i'm running a win7 comp 64 bit and a 32 bit DA4 pro last release b4 4.5 with 8 gig ddr3 ram dual 2.1 big processor and a 500gb hdd with 1tb exthd all my content is ( other than genesis) on the 1tb exthd and i havent had much issues with mem lag or leak.  although that doesnt mean i am special or maybe it does but the more background progs you have running on your system does hinder the usage of your mem expecially if you dont have graphics card specific mem ( graphics card onboard mem). windows is notorious for using mem that you cant find out where its being used so is possible that you have more than half your int hdd occupied with your programming and content.  this in it`s own would slow your preformance as well as needing to clean your registry and defragging and optimising your hdd and maybe even defragging your hdd registry.  auslogics has free programs on cnet.downloads.com for registry cleaner defragger and registry defragger that could and most likely will speed your usage and minimize your mem leakage.

On a hunch this afternoon, I loaded a scene similar to what caused my issues, and surprise surprise, it occupied 4.5GB in memory. Crap.... I'm now of the mindset that what I thought was memory leak was actually a bottleneck of geometry in the scene. I had a rather large aresenal on a table composed of around two dozen small props inside a room prop, and a V4 in SubD mode. I suspect that the issue was a massive poly count that just wasn't taking up memory. Unfortunately, I have no way of knowing what that poly count was without exporting the whole scene to a modeling program. I've got Hex, Vue 8 Esprit and scuptris, but nothing with the horsepower of, say, Zbrush or 3DS/Maya, etc.

Would you or anyone know if Studio has a mode for displaying the poly count in a scene? Vue has a handy info line showing the poly count at the bottom of the viewport, for example.

ya know i've really never thought about if DS has a poly count indicator so i'm sorry i wouldn't know atm. may have to explore that issue lol.  normally i don't use the sub-d function unless i have a really good close up that i need any of the characters to be uber smooth since most of my images have them at at least 10' distance from the camera and a whole scene around them. 

there are more shall we say tech savvy users of DS here in rendo but if you ask over in the DAZ3d.com forums they have more specific of an answer

Actually I asked there first, but the place is like a ghost town. :-/  One of the guys there that works with Lux like I do, but is far more into the technical side of it, mentioned poly counts as a possible culprit. Other than that, I'm still curious if it was too many props (geometry wise) or there is some sort of glitch that leads to the memory issue.

With the SubD, I normally use it on clothing, especially suits and things that were designed for poser. For whatever reason, it never smooths out on its own like it should. Good call on the distance part though. That's definitely something I need to consider more often!

Oh well. Thanks for talkin' it over with me. Troubleshooting is good relief.

Use the scene info tab (it's under the "Window" dropdown in DS4) to find out the poly count.

There were a number of reports that DS4's viewport system was slow and laggy on large-ish scenes, so this could be what your experiencing, so instead of using SubD try turning up the smoothing angle on the surfaces instead.

This is all interesting to know. I haven't haven't anywhere near as many crashes since I upgraded to a 64bit machine (with 16 gig) but I don't often do heavy scenes (man!). However, I was trying something with one of Mec4D's hair tests and that really slowed me down, but those are like 100s of K poly models. Didn't crash though. I'm hoping 4.5 will be better generally with memory management and viewport response, but I'm letting others do the testing! Not that I can use something that doesn't have Reality or Gen X.

By the way, is Cath (Mec4D) posting at DAZ, does anyone know? I couldn't see anything, but who can find anything there as things are. It would be great if she was posting here.

Quote - This is all interesting to know. I haven't haven't anywhere near as many crashes since I upgraded to a 64bit machine (with 16 gig) but I don't often do heavy scenes (man!). However, I was trying something with one of Mec4D's hair tests and that really slowed me down, but those are like 100s of K poly models. Didn't crash though. I'm hoping 4.5 will be better generally with memory management and viewport response, but I'm letting others do the testing! Not that I can use something that doesn't have Reality or Gen X.

By the way, is Cath (Mec4D) posting at DAZ, does anyone know? I couldn't see anything, but who can find anything there as things are. It would be great if she was posting here.

Fry, I haven't seen her post here. Hopefully its because she's hard at work on her hair plug-in. In the event you haven't seen this, there's a fellow working on "I can't believe my hair" or something to that end here at Rendo. Allesandro. It's mega-impressive.

Actually I came to post where I found the scene information tab for studio: Window--Tab--Scene Info. Drats, that was too easy! I found it by mistake today.

And in finding that, my mega scene counted in at 819,736 vertices. I haven't a frame of refrence, but that does sound like a lot. I'll do a comparo next time I have a stonemason scene running.

Quote -
And in finding that, my mega scene counted in at 819,736 vertices. I haven't a frame of refrence, but that does sound like a lot. I'll do a comparo next time I have a stonemason scene running.

I don't know either about that, but my 4 gig machine runs a scene with 500517 vertices with a bit of lag, if that bit of info helps at all. 

Quote - *
*Someone did suggest upgrading to 4.5, but that's a no go for me as I'm a heavy Reality/Lux user for which 4.5 is not compatible as of this writing.

You will find this helpful http://preta3d.com/blog/2012/05/19/reality-and-studio-4-5/ a blog post from Preta3d the comment on the bottom is from Preta3d says that version 2.5 of Reality for Daz Studio 4.5 is being beta tested now.

You can have 4.5 on from what I have read you just have to do a custom install and not let it upgrade.. 

yeah about the 4.5 you can't have it on same "drive" as your DS4 or DS4pro especially sind it's only a release candidate not a public upgrade

Thank you gents. Paolo posts fairly regularly in the Reality thread here on Rendo. Unless he changed his mind, last I read from him was that he was waiting for Studio 4.5 to go beyond Beta to update Reailty. I'll shoot over to the link and take a peek.

Dragon, I did download 4.5 the other day, but I'm still leery on installing it on my main machine HD. I do need to back it up, so when I get that done, I'll put it on my back up HD. Thanks for the confirmation!

even dddaz3d staff  suggest to install 4.5 on another driive and not the same drive as 4 even if pro

No, DAZ says don't install both 4.0 and 4.5 on the same system as they won't coexist - they need to be on different systems, either distinct computers or the same computer running with dual boot options (or, if it will work, each on a different virtual machine).

Quote - No, DAZ says don't install both 4.0 and 4.5 on the same system as they won't coexist - they need to be on different systems, either distinct computers or the same computer running with dual boot options (or, if it will work, each on a different virtual machine).

Richard, is this just for the beta of 4.5, or will this also translate when 4.5 becomes final? (The not installing on the same machine part)

As far as I know it is likely to apply to the release version, but it's always possible they will do something to avoid that.