frequent crashes in Houdini

[dhernand]

Per Professor Clark Stalworth
I have different students in different scenarios who are getting frequent crashes in Houdini. One when trying to render, another when trying to use 'fluids' within the package. Both are getting memory exception crashes. The one who needed to render was able to complete his render when he got on a laptop running Vista 64 bit with 4GB of RAM.


So my question is, is there anyway we can get XP in the labs to allocate more memory to Houidini or can we get more memory seen by the system generally? Could this be a pagefile issue?


Am I right in assuming the XP side of those machines can only see 2GB of RAM?

[dhernand]

Please do send me screen shots of the errors along with the Houdini version you are using in Atlanta.
Did you have these kinds of problems last quarter or the quarter before? Aside from the change to AD has anything else changed on your image?

XP sees a little over 3 gigs of ram -so, I don't think the problem is due to lack of memory. It could be a permissions issue. Houdini may be trying to write to a temporary location and that location may have restrictive perms.

Are all students having these problem in Houdini? The machine(s) that this problem shows up on, is there ample disk space on it?
Are the students working or rendering locally or over the network?

Is there a possibility that we could vnc or remote into one of the machines where this problem is occurring and test Houdini?
Dan

[dhernand]

from Clarke:
* what was student doing when crash occurred? rendering
* what was the exact error? see screen cap
* what version of houdini? 9.5
* any other applications open while houdini was being used? no
* is this happening in linux, windows, both? just windows
* may i have a screen shot of the error? attached
* if you emulate what the student has done to cause the crash does
it happen with you using your login? haven't tried that yet - but will
* can you send me the project file causing the problems? attached
* is this problem wide-spread or, is it confined to a few students? this is happening to a range of students in a range of circumstances
* are the students rendering or working on their files locally or,
over the network? trying to render ip - i.e. from the interface - nothing over the network

[dhernand]

Per Hassan Taimur:
Clark,

I have noticed the project file you sent always seems to crash if i try to change the objectmergeexample/blast1_uneeded_object. see if you can edit that node or remove it.

Other than that, i found some links to caching issues that might be causing this.

See if these help:

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option= ... ic&t=12936

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?showtopic=7589

Regards,
Hassan.

[dhernand]

Hello Hassan -

Thanks very much for the suggestions.

I don't think the error in that file we were getting was related to the aspect you mention, but I'll have the student take a look at it tomorrow. Also, the forums you referred me to seem to be focused mainly on dynamic sims and also on using vista. Although we have had a student have this mem allocation error when he was trying to do a simple DOPs sim, I don't think he was caching. Also, this mem error is spread across a number of student projects that run the gamut - modelling, rendering, DOPs etc.

So, I think we haven't really cracked it yet. I'm wondering if you think an email to support at Side Effects would help? Perhaps they have seen this problem?

Thanks for your help and assistance -

Clarke Stallworth