I am experiencing a critical memory usage issue with Rhino 8 on my Apple M3 Max (Apple Silicon, 36 GB ).
During normal modeling sessions (typically under 2 hours), Rhino’s memory usage progressively increases and can reach up to 75 GB according to macOS Activity Monitor. This eventually causes the system to force quit applications due to extreme memory pressure. (see attached image)
Project details:
No plug-ins installed
No imported files (no STEP/IGES/STL)
Only simple native geometryFile size 36 mb
Fresh sessions (Rhino not left open for extended periods)
Physical based Materials are used
Materials are assigned to layers
Often working in Rendered display mode
Could you please advise:
• Whether this is a known issue in Rhino 8 for Mac
• If there are recommended settings or patches
• What diagnostic logs or system reports I should provide
Apple macOS Version 14.6.1 (Build 23G93) (Physical RAM: 36GB)
Mac Model Identifier: Mac15,11
Language: en
.NET 8.0.14
Metal GPU Family Apple 7
Metal GPU Family Common 3
Metal GPU Family Mac 2
Graphics processors
Apple M3 Max
Color LCD (1728 x 1117 @ 120.00Hz)
GPU Vendor: Apple
I see one existing rendering issue but that’s after a very particular scripted render config. Can you describe your workflow a little bit more? Thanks.
I don’t perform actual rendering in Rhino; I only use Rendered mode with scene lighting. The materials are physically based, and I’m using my own HDRI environment. Some materials include textures, but only minimally. Materials are assigned to layers (that are sometimes not 100% responsive - unfortunatelly )
I’m doing most of my work on an M3 Max these days, and will have Rhino files open for hours or days without running into memory issues.
Since you mention that the memory usage progressively increases, do you also see this behavior when you only have a new document open from a factory-default template and do some work in that? Or is this actually file-specific? If the latter, please post that 3dm file.
Other than that,
Is there a reason for running an outdated version of Rhino 8 on an older version of macOS?
-wim
Thanks for your reply,
I actually experienced it during last 6 months already. Different projects, different files. This time I had just one file opened and it arrived to 75GB, so decided to report it, cause this is really bad.
So I dont think it is related to the latest IOS or Rhino version.
Year ago I used only auxpecker for rendered view. Then I started to use Physically based environments. So maybe this memory issue is related to that? Even then, I would not expect this happen on relatively powerful Mac with very simple object geometry.
You mentioned, you dont have any problem with Rhino on Mac, what type of materials do you use for Rendered view?
In order to debug this, either send us a file, or see if updating your OS resolves this, or see if this happens, as Wim asked, in a factory default template where you just model for 3 hours without the material setup you mention.
Even if it is not file specific it can still be helpful to send a file where this happens, because we can’t reproduce it here so far.
