Memory Usage Appears Misinformed

Deadline
1

Hello

We’re trying to get several large Maya scenes rendered on our small Deadline network and one of the Mac Pros (Mid 2012) keeps failing to get going. We are reasonably sure that it is memory related as the scenes are approximately 55 million triangles and the image is approximately 5000 x 5000 pixels. All of the Macs are on the edge but getting on with it, except this one!

Looking at the statistics on the Slave Specification tab it reports 5.6GB/5.6GB 100% (sometimes it reports 3.0GB/3.0GB 100%) when the Mac Pro has 24GB installed. I checked on the Monitor for this particular Slave and it too reports the same.

I opened ‘About this Mac’ and this reported 24GB and that all is well. I launched Activity Monitor and it too suggested that 24GB was available.

I sent a scene to the troublesome Mac Pro and watched the log and it reported physical memory detected 24576Mb.

It’s curious. Could Deadline simply be misinformed or should I be concerned?

Thanks.

Chris

2

Hello,

It’s definitely possible we are calling the info wrong. I’m going to have to talk to one of our devs when he is back in tomorrow and see if he has any ideas of how we are doing this.

3

Thanks for your prompt reply

Its odd. Trying to give you more information I am looking in the Monitor at all of our Slaves and the ‘Total Memory’ column reports correctly for 5 Macs, even a very similar Mac Pro, but this particular Mac Pro still is reported as having 5.6GB and not 24GB. Curious.

4

Hello,

Can I have you open a terminal window on the problem Mac and run the command

sysctl -a | grep mem

This will give us a some output we can use to try to diagnose the issue. If you can run this 2 or 3 times, with a bit of time between them, we can hopefully get to the bottom of this

5

Hi

Good idea to use Terminal to enquire on the memory. Please find below my typical results.

MacPro-03:~ Chris$ sysctl -a | grep mem hw.physmem = 2147483648 hw.usermem = 962736128 hw.memsize = 25769803776 kern.memorystatus_vm_pressure_level: 1 kern.memorystatus_purge_on_warning: 2 kern.memorystatus_purge_on_urgent: 5 kern.memorystatus_purge_on_critical: 8 vm.memory_pressure: 0 hw.memsize: 25769803776 machdep.memmap.Conventional: 25759031296 machdep.memmap.RuntimeServices: 421888 machdep.memmap.ACPIReclaim: 159744 machdep.memmap.ACPINVS: 1409024 machdep.memmap.PalCode: 0 machdep.memmap.Reserved: 8781824 machdep.memmap.Unusable: 0 machdep.memmap.Other: 0 audit.session.member_set_sflags_mask: 0 audit.session.member_clear_sflags_mask: 16384

I have launched the Slave again and under the ‘Slave Specifications’ tab the Memory Usage is displaying as 8.5GB / 8.5GB (100%). This varies. If I restart it is about 3.0GB and it appears to get a little larger each time I launch the Slave.

I have 6 x 4GB Unbuffered DIMMs fitted. I re-seated them yesterday and I may try swapping them for the 3 x 8GB buffered DIMMs I have in another Mac Pro 5,1 just to see if the memory modules are in anyway associated.

I hope this helps.

6

A little more to add - Reviewing the Deadline Monitor with a colleague this morning we noticed that the memory of 2 Macs were being reported as much less than they actually had, both of these Macs are the only ones running OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks. I suspect this is relevant.