decreasing render time trick.

[ankit4d]

Hi guys, yesterday i was working on a scene which took only 1 minute to render, i saved the file and went home...and today i tried rendering it again and it took 16 minutes to render. I often face this situation. What i do is I simply restart the pc, and when i render it again it take only 1 minute....

What actually happens when i restart my pc.

[frank1331]

You are freeing up memory that the PC doesnt have to use to store info.

[Ky Lane]

Anyone successfully used any memory management software to alleviate things like this?

[mattclinch]

just run garbage collection in max? run gc() from maxscript window.

[Shane Gee]

here is a query related to this.

 

I opened a scene I was previously working on and try to move an object and it moves it all over the place with no control, slightest move of the mouse and it is moved off the screen.

 

I have had this problem in the past normally just restart MAX. but it still had the same problem. I had to restart the computer. Now it is fine and things move alright... strange I would have to restart the PC. Also I could not undo anything while this problem was happening. fine after the PC restart

 

Any ideas... or is just the normal dodgy MAX as usual.

[SandmanNinja]

Windows itself has horrible garbage collection routines.

 

When I was a programmer (VB, x86 assembler, Pascal) I would put a routine at the start of each program to manually call a garbage collection routine.

I also ran a profiler to look for memory leaks and see where my program spent the most time. If an individual subroutine had the highest CPU usage, I'd re-write it in assembler.

 

I have a funny feeling that no one spends this much time programming any more.

 

The end result is that you should reboot your computer regularly and keep your hard drive nice and tidy (defrag) - the latter helps the swap file as it grows and shrinks.

[ankit4d]

Thanks a lot for your reply, but is there any other option instead of restarting pc.

[shaneis]

Ahh, it's a sad state of affairs, when in 2009, we are still dealing with memory-hogging, memory-leaking buggy software running on an unstable, inefficient OS which leads us to solutions like "restart the program" or "reboot the PC". All this for the privilege of paying thousands for the right to use these products from proprietary vendors with enormous R&D.

 

So, thank you Autodesk and thank you Microsoft for your undying devotion to providing high quality, refined products to your paying customers.

 

ANKIT: There are freeware/ shareware apps for Windows that will purge RAM for you, but be careful which ones you choose. Also, try restarting your Max session and do not load any textures or shaded views - these will use up a lot of RAM. Better yet, if Max allows rendering from the Windows command line, use that option.

[ankit4d]

Thanks for your reply Shane, i will try it.

[LuckyST]

if you are using irradiance map, it might have something to do with "incremental add"?

 

or you might have some sort of windows program disturbing the rendering.

[Klokwerks]

We had a similar problem too. However after countless reboots we decided to look into hardware issues. We swapped out the RAM and haven't had a problem since. Just a thought... you may want to do some test on your RAM and see if you need to buy some new.

[Klokwerks]

Ooops... sorry. Forgot to add what software we used. Try using Everest to benchmark your PC performance. This way you can look into where your running slow if at all and address things from there.