I’m currently running into some an issue with one shot in particular. The shot has around 5 million particles in pflow which was advected from a lo rez fume sim. When we goto the partition the ram usage just keeps creeping up until it hits the max then continues to use virutal memory. We left it running over night and found our PF usage at 60GB. Any insights to this would be greatly appreciated. Also, we have numerous other shots with a similar setups and had no problems partitioning those. Please advise as soon as you can.
Nevermind. I had a cache operator set to render instead of viewport. problem solved!
Glad you figured it out.
As a rule of thumb, Krakatoa does NOT use much memory when saving or partitioning, but the source particle systems will.
Krakatoa asks the sources to update as for rendering, then gets something like 50K particles at a time (in v1.6.0) and writes them to the PRT file, then repeats until all particles are saved. Thus, whenever you see memory ballooning during a saving particles process, it is usually the source systems and not Krakatoa.
The only exception is when the “Save Lighting as Emission” option is checked, since Krakatoa has to load into memory, sort and light all particles before it can dump them to disk, thus the memory usage will be similar to the one when rendering particles.