I would like to suggest a control of how much memory rhino and specially rendering can take. For apple silicon users, memory swap is a real issue since our SSDs are not replaceable.
I run rhino on a 16gb ram machine and it frequently swaps more than a Gb per render. It would be much healthier for the machine if i could limit the memory use.
Thank you very much.
There isn’t a way to limit memory. If you do a large render, say a 4K resolution (3840x2160) then just to hold create the image you’ll need at least ~470MB of memory. Then of course if you use lots of image textures and have lots of geometry that will increase the memory usage.
There is not really a way to limit that memory usage. Any attempt to lower that would involve writing data to the disk ourselves - which is essentially what you don’t want. I don’t see a way of decreasing the amount of memory usage other than through things you can do yourself:
Wow, never knew that…
Yes. If you ever come across Louis Rossmann, he has spent almost a decade of his life trying to campaign for Apple to, you know, not enslave people to unfixable Apple products. You can replace them, but you have to go through specialist, and Apple will void your warranty immediately I’d imagine. They even had a device in there that made certain parts invalid for replacement, by giving them a sort of “ID”, completely unnecessarily as part of their anti-consumer drive.
Could the image be sliced and rendered in parts?
That would be a big improvement.
you could probably write a script to do that.
Yeah. The computers themselves will work for decades. I still have a 2012 imac that runs WELL. They need to make us buy new ones somehow…
I’m sure there will be an third party solution for this in the future, like for iphones. Or else there will be mountains of perfectly good computers with dead ssds laying around.
For what it is worth I work also with a 16GB M1 MBP already for years. I haven’t run into problems with SDD even though my workloads cause lots of swap usage.
Just compiling Rhino takes already an hour on this thing.
Yeah, i read they predict a 10 year lifespan for a workload of 9GB written a day. It is not THAT bad.
But since it will be basically rendered useless after that, i would like to save as much as i can.
I am moving my OS to a thunderbolt nvme drive just because of that.
mac studio ssd is replaceable though. with a proprietary drive, but that is a start.