Some kind of memory leak?

[しord ひberman]

Hi,

i have a strange problem and i hope you can help.

When i open the program without anything loaded, it uses about 220 mb of ram. When i open a package and look under preferences -> general -> "current memory used", It displays about 3 gig of ram with my current project. In reality, Designer uses 5.1 gig of ram now.
When i close the package without any change, Designer seems to release some memory, but it won't go down to 220 mb from the beginning. It stays at about 3 gig of ram usage.

Now i open the same package again and also close the package again. The ram of Designer stacks up to 3,7 gig. When i repeat this process, it is going to >4 gig of ram, and so on...

It stacks higher and higher and i can't do anything. The ram only goes down when i delete some nodes or close the package, but it never releases ALL the memory. Restarting the program is the only solution to free all the memory.

I upgraded my ram to 32 gig, but even that is not enough (of course).
At some point, Designer used 23 gig of ram without any packages open. At some point, my system uses swap space, but i really want to avoid that.


I tried to set a custom memory budget, but Designer just ignores it. Changing the parent size to smaller values, like 512x512, makes it more usable without a restart, but the problem stays the same.

My system:
Linux (Manjaro)
Ryzen 3600
GTX 1080ti
32 gig ram

[Luca Giarrizzo]

Hello!

Thank you for reporting this issue. The memory usage may be caused by the cache of the package's dependencies. Dependencies may not be properly unloaded when closing a package during a given session.
I will perform some tests and let you know of what I find. I appreciate your patience!

Best regards,
Luca

QA Analyst
Substance 3D Designer team

[しord ひberman]

Thank you for your efforts!

[Recon]

I tested on my end as well, 2019, 2020, and 2021. No issues, here, prolly a bug. of some sort.

Did you try and re-install Designer and delete Temp files, cache etc?

I would also check and be sure its not related to that one project. I know a few years back I had an issue with memory stacking it ended up being related to that project only.

[Luca Giarrizzo]

Hello again!

Substance 3D Designer will keep items in memory as cache to ensure its stays reactive and interactive without latency. This includes the image cache which budget you can control in the Preferences.

This means some extra memory will always be used as you load and close projects in the application, thus you will never go back to the starting memory usage.

That being said, based on your report we can definitely improve this cache management so memory is released more efficiently over the course of a session. This would help preventing cache to build up to using the entire available memory pool and hit the pagefile – however rendering large graphs at high resolutions means the image cache can hit the pagefile eventually.

You can share the memory budgets you have set in the General section of the Preferences, so we can perform some comparative testing and try to reproduce the application ignoring these budgets.

Thank you again for the helpful report!

Best regards,

Luca
QA Analyst
Substance 3D Designer team

[しord ひberman]

Originally posted by Recon:

Did you try and re-install Designer and delete Temp files, cache etc?

Thx for your help. I tried that but it won't affect anything. I also tried the 2020 version but it has the same behaviour.

Originally posted by Luca Giarrizzo:

Hello again!

Substance 3D Designer will keep items in memory as cache to ensure its stays reactive and interactive without latency. This includes the image cache which budget you can control in the Preferences.

This means some extra memory will always be used as you load and close projects in the application, thus you will never go back to the starting memory usage.

That being said, based on your report we can definitely improve this cache management so memory is released more efficiently over the course of a session. This would help preventing cache to build up to using the entire available memory pool and hit the pagefile – however rendering large graphs at high resolutions means the image cache can hit the pagefile eventually.

You can share the memory budgets you have set in the General section of the Preferences, so we can perform some comparative testing and try to reproduce the application ignoring these budgets.

Thank you again for the helpful report!

Best regards,

Luca
QA Analyst
Substance 3D Designer team

Thank you for your response. Ok, it seems like it is some sort of expected behaviour. I did some tests and i have to withdraw from my statement about the program ignoring the "custom budget" in the preferences. It is actually creating temp files in the temp-directory when i go above that limit. The ram do also go up in that process, but not that much. When the temp dir get's bigger by 1 gig, the ram only rises about 70 mb. I think it's just some thumbnails from nodes or something like that.

Thank you again for your great support! I really appreciate that!!