Cool VL Viewer forum

Hello Henry,

just had a memory crash with version 1.26.5.13. I could take photos in that sim for about 30 minutes, then wanted to have a 'freeze frame' from snapshots because I wanted to freeze the dancing people to take a better snap. At this points was a first crash (the settings were still at 5600x3000 for a snap-to-disc). But the crash I mean came after relogging. Same sim, same people, I cammed around a bit, got a 'virtual memory gets low, reducing view distance', one wall texture became black, CRASH. This is the log of the crash:

http://xp2.de/tillie/log-2012-10-14.zip

Dump file was 0 bytes.

Ouch !!! You do realize that this represents no less than 48Mb of memory to allocate instantly for the snapshot, do you ?... Not surprising that you get an out of virtual addressing space crash in a busy sim with such snapshots...


As you can see, the allocated virtual memory reached 2.9Gb (not counting fragmentation) when the viewer crashed (for a maximum of 3Gb of usable virtual address space, since 1Gb is reserved for the OS and a 32bits application can't address more than 4Gb in total (3Gb only when running on 32bits OSes)). The crash is therefore normal and unavoidable at this point (the throttling algorithm can't do miracles: it attempts to lower the memory used for the textures, but it takes a few seconds for this to happen since lower resolution textures must be used before the highres ones are released).

For a usage such as yours (with an obviously HUGE screen), I'd recommend increasing the MainMemorySafetyMargin setting (with defaults to 150Mb): doubling it (and lowering the SafetyMargin1stStepRatio setting to 2.0 to avoid seeing texture discard throttling happening too soon) should do the trick (just test via trial and error till you find a good value).

PS: you can enable the "Memory" debug tab and display the debug console to follow memory usage in real time while the viewer runs: this will help you finding the proper settings.

I didnt want to take a snap inside SL (I usually use FRAPS), I just wanted to open the snapshot window to enable the 'freeze frame' (taking snaps of moving people is *yuck*). But as there is no 'open snapshot window without taking a snap' it just did what it did last time, and that was a really huge snapshot.

And thanks for the setting suggestions, will try out.