I do not know if this is supposed to happen, but lately i noticed that Blender gradually increases my RAM usage. Usually it is around 7 GB of usage and steadily stays like that. But lately it increases it alot! I have 24 GB of Ram and it uses 20-22 GB!
And when that happens Blender gets extremely slow, Undoing takes forever, sometimes adding an object takes awhile, rotating/scaling slows down, and like even when i just move the object from one spot to another! I think it MAY be my HDD because I had a 80GB Seagate HDD and it worked fine on there but on this 500GB Western Digital, it seems to be doing this. Sometimes even opening Blender itself takes forever. I usually have Blender running by itself because I know Chrome takes up some usage. So does anyone have any ideas? on what could be causing this?
Specs:
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M
CPU: Intel Core i7 3630QM @ 2.4Ghz, 3.2 with Turbo Boost
RAM: 24 GB
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate (not sure if that is applicable)
PCSX2 version: 1.2.1 (r5875)
Just about every large program ‘leaks’ memory over time. Most of the time you’ll only notice this when things slow to a crawl when the system runs out of free RAM and has to start swapping out to disk which is what it sounds like you’re noticing. The easiest solution is probably to just restart the app when you start to notice things slowing down. Note: this applies to any app that you notice significant increases in memory usage whether it’s Blender, Chrome, or some other app since as they increase the amount of RAM they use, it decreases the amount of available RAM for all other apps… once you hit the wall, all apps suffer.
When i had Blender on my Acer Aspire, i dont remember it going slow like that tho, and i had the Seagate HDD for the Acer. It would freeze every once and awhile, but thats it. Oh i forgot to mention that My Blender file size is over 2GB in size. Maybe that could be a cause? when i had Blender on my Acer it wasnt not near that size. I mean if i have to turn off Blender on and off, ill do it but its going to be turning on and off ALOT! it dosent take too long for it to start going slow, especially if i catch my stride.
Could that increasing memory consumption be “just” the undo system monitoring your changes to the file?
Try defining a memory limit for undo in the user preferences (User Preferences > “Editing” tab, left column) and see if that helps.
If it is only a problem when working with that file, then you have your answer. 2GB is decently large file so it wouldn’t surprise me if that were the source of your problem. First thing to try would be IkariShinji’s suggestion re: undo. If that doesn’t do it, restarting Blender won’t solve that problem for long: it’s a largish document and is likely actually using all that memory rather than leaking. So then your choices would be to either reduce the file size by some combination of simplifying/splitting into multiple files or getting more RAM.
I should clarify: since it sounds like RAM use is still growing over time, there’s probably still a slow leak. However, I was assuming that the issue was a slow leak over a long period of time (i.e. many hours to several days or more). Due to the size of your file (whether due to large amounts of geometry, textures, whatever), you are likely to feel the effect of it much, much sooner so the usual ‘just restart’ solution isn’t going to help much.
I wanted to revive this thread. I’m using 2.79 and experiencing very similar symptoms.
I have 32GB or ram installed but as soon as Blender gets close to memory usage of about 10GB it begins to slow to such a crawl as to be impossible to use without a restart.
I recently changed the Undo limit from 32 to 16 which has helped, but given I’m using less than 1/3 of my installed ram I’m still at a loss.