Alibre is a memory eater...

[cgriffin]

Alibre is a memory eater...

Out of curiosity one day I had Alibre open with a new file, I closed it while watching the Task Manager, to see how much space the new file used. Amazingly, after closing the window, Alibre took up not less, but MORE memory. I opened and closed a "new part" a few times, and the task manager listed Alibre's Mem Usage increasing each time until it topped out at 3MB extra. Sounds like some orphan memory allocation...

 

[jwknecht]

Yes. There are several other posts about this memory leak. Best thing to do is to watch the task manager and restart the application when the memory taken up becomes too large.

 

[steved]

Memory leak

I find it worst when working on drawings, when I often have to restart frequently.

I run a program called FreeRAM XP Pro that sits in my system tray that monitors the memory used.

Cheers

Steve

 

[indesign]

My biggest problem comes when working on assembly drawing where there are interferences and modeled threads or simular features.

It seems to me that Alibre is refreshing (regenerating) way too much detail and too often. I find when I am working on things like this that I must close Alibre out and reopen. It has been a while since I had to reboot or use the memory defragger to get memory back.

Occasionally I have noticed I need to do a CTRL-ALT-DEL to catch an open session that fails to close. These problems have improved greatly from the previous release.

 

[ramirin]

I just closed my work and opened task manager to see the amount of memory usage for alibre. Result was 613 437K now after few minutes it's 627 752K and constantly growing without anything but home window open.. Crazy!

 

[Zap_Designer]

I have 2GB of ram on a very fast machine.
It doesn't matter however, anytime Alibre reaches more then 300MB of used memory it seems to slow to a crawl.
I have to often kill the program when it reaches 500MB

 

[scarr]

Here's something to try (we're seeing this same problem with Catia V5) - with the task mamanger window open, open a part or drawing in Alibre and note the increase in memory usage even if you're not working in the window. Now minimize the Alibre window and see if the memory usage doesn't drop - I watched mine go from 35,000k to 1,400k. With Catia it's caused by a problem between Catia and Java. It might be possible that the same thing is happening here. Were supposed to get a fix for this today (Catia) and I'll let you know what happens. If this works for you, it's better than having to exit Alibre altogether.

 

[steved]

Memory eater

Hi Scarr

I just tried the same test.

Drawing open 85.7k
Minimize drawing 86k
Minimize Alibre home window 7.2k

Not sure what this means though.

Cheers

Steve

 

[MilesH]

Occasionally, AD suddenly bogs down following a single modelling operation - I've found that this can often be cured by an Undo - Redo.

 

[hartlw]

Tried it:

Start computer:
Physical Memory: 530mb
Available Memory: 330mb

Start Alibre and work with it:
Available Memory: 140mb

Close Alibre:
Available Memory: 330mb

It takes about 3 secs after closing Alibre for the memory to go back to 330mb in increments. So some kind of internal adjustmenst is taking place.

Do other machines have some kind of larger, adjustable, memory cache which doesn't get cleared? In the old days I think you could set size of memory cache. Does AD take it upon itself to do this and then not clear it
in some cases?

 

[hartlw]

I'll be darned. Now it's happening to me. Missing 130mb. I was looking at "performance" inTask Manger, and I wondered how others knew how much memory was being used by AD. So I opened Task Manager (no longer in AD) and looked at processes. Sure enough, the memory was being used by Alibre.

Just a wild guess. This may be the OS doing standard cacheing. If you open Word or Xcel the first time, it takes a while. Open it again, and it pops right up.

If the OS sets aside a fixed amount of memory for a cache, that would explain why system suddenly slows down even when you have a lot of memory. You run out of cache.

I have a handy tool called tune-up. Hold on while I use it to "optimize" memory. If it's smart, it will see memory is assigned to Alibre but Alibre isn't open, and release it.

OK, Not quite sure what to make of result. Alibre is still holding on to 100,000K but available memory shows up the same as when I start the computer.

It miay be that Alibre is still staying in the OS memory cache, but some of it was cleared out by "optimizer" based on it's judgement of what really wasn't essential.

Increased speed of reloading isn't obvious second time with AD because of the hold-up with going on-line.

Anyhow, that's my nickel.

Tried to add subject of my post to "OS is memory eater," but edit wouldn't let me do it.

 

[hartlw]

OS is memory eater

The more I think about it, the more this seems like the scenario.

Run AD and use up all or part of the OS set cache.

Close AD and now the OS sees cache almost full and adds more cache so that
1) there is less available memory AFTER closing AD and
2) AD runs fast again when you reopen.

Why doesn't OS clean out cache after you close? It's trying to save time when you reopen AD.

Why doesn't system add more cache while AD is running? Beats me.

 

[hartlw]

And why does the system give the additional cache memory to Alibre? Probably because no one else around, like Word.

To see what is really going on you either need inside information, or you have to play around by opening and closing various programs and keeping track of memory allocation. Sorry, would love to do it and find out, but something else is bugging me right now.

 

[hartlw]

Stephany,

Search "windows memory" on the internet, or try MS tech Support.

Werner

 

[JordanCClark]

This looks like it's turning into "the subject that just-- won't-- die!" (Think William Shatner when saying it... :lol: )

A memory manger may be a solution:

http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/system.htm

Look for a program called MaxMem. I've had some success with it. They have a lot of other nifty things there, too. 8)

This may or may not work, depending on how Alibre wants to utilize memory, so file this with my other opinions: My opinion, and a dollar, will by a can of soda... :wink:

Regards,

Jordan

 

[hartlw]

Quote from Wilkipedia:

"A memory manager is a part of a computer program which accepts requests from the program to allocate and deallocate chunks of memory."

This implies Alibre may be involved- during execution anyhow. But the program may be juggling available memory allocation, not changing it, which may still be done by the Operating System. You might wish to dig into MS knowledge base for Memory Allocation. Half the battle is having the correct search term (memory allocation).

 

[aa1]

One of the key things we are interested in is improving our performance. From reading the issues in this area of the forum, quite a few seems to be memory leak related, but I wanted to take this opportunity to maybe expand on that somewhat, and see if we can also identify performance issues as well. These issues seem to be more involved and elusive, and by virtue require some investigation to get to the source.

Some of the posts in this area of the forum certainly need to be looked at by Alibre. I would like to ask if anyone in this forum comes across issues that seem to cause a memory leak, or if anyone has issues with slow performance, please let us know via this area of the forum. The more information the better. If we can capture some real world examples from our users, we stand to make significant improvements in our performance.

 

[gregmilliken]

All,

Thanks for the lively discussion on this topic, but Michael and I discussed this and we want to continue to log and track all issues requiring a direct response from Alibre via our standard support process rather than using the forum for that purpose. I don't want to discourage the discussion on the forum, I just don't think it will be efficient to "report" issues this way.

We really appreciate the feedback on this sort of thing, and in general, irrespective of a specific problem report, we are always working to optimize memory utilization by Alibre Design. There has been some speculation in this thread about the operating system and how it allocates and frees memory and so on, and as you can imagine, this can get pretty complex quickly. It is likely some of the issues raised here are indeed issues with Alibre Design that we need to look into, but it is also likely, as some have surmised, that some things people are seeing are related to how the operating system handles memory.

Suffice it to say we are constantly working to optimize the application, and as some of you may be aware, we are in the midst of a "port" of our application from MSJava to .NET. Unfortunately, Java can present somewhat of a blackbox with respect to memory usage and it also prevents the use of some modern development tools that are really useful in analyzing things like memory allocation. The .NET platform will signficantly enhance our ability to bring to bear all the modern development tools and techniques at our disposal to deliver the best product possible.

So in summary, if you feel you have a specific memory issue you want to bring to our attention and have us look into, please log it as a support request and Michael will be working closely with the support, QA and development teams to assess it.

Thanks,
Greg

 

[jboorse]

Re:

Hi Greg,

I think you are on the right direction, in that .net may be the way to go, and I think you have the support of many users of Alibre. What ever it takes to make a efficient, reliable product that can keep up with our creativity (the latter I know is a tall order to fill), do it.

But you have been talking about .net for awhile now. Is there any time frame frame you are talking here? Again, I know that can be hard to anwser, as I know the software business is very tricky, but a ball park estimate of when that will come will motivate us to continue on.