Grasshopper

algorithmic modeling for Rhino

There seems to be a bug where, while animating a slider in grasshopper, the screen will start flickering black before crashing completely. The file itself is not computationally heavy; it's only composed of about 1000 line objects and no surfaces. I've uploaded a screenshot of what the last frames look like right before the crash. They seem to start inverting. Some previous crashes showed frames that were not only inverted but also tiled. The frames are 1280x720, 5000 frames per animation (Is there a way for me to exceed 10000?). Graphics card is GTX 780 with latest drivers. On occasions I've seen a warning message pop up saying that Rhino is low on memory, even though the task manager clearly shows more than 10 gigs still available. How should I go about diagnosing the problem?

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Hi An,

memory warnings (and crashes) are usually due to 1 of 4 causes:

  • You are actually low on or out of memory. This is rarer than you think. It doesn't matter how much or how little physical memory you still have left, what matters is how much memory Rhino is using compared to how much Windows is prepared to give it. On 32-bit systems this is usually 2, sometimes 3 Gigs. On 64-bit systems it's such a high limit that it's unlikely you've reached the limit.
  • You're low on or out of specially allocated memory/handles. Certain processes such as GDI drawing or winforms UI elements require a handle per instance. Every window, every label, every button, every slider, every bitmap... each one has a unique handle associated with it. Depending on the windows version, you either get a few, some, a bunch or lots of these handles to play with. When you start running out, usually the first sign is that the UI goes all wonky. Text disappears, fonts suddenly look terrible, parts of windows go missing. When all the GDI handles that are allowed have been claimed, the application will crash. The same may be true for OpenGL or DirectX handles, I'm not an expert on those.
  • There's an arithmetic error causing an overflow error. Sometimes these are handled gracefully and you get a proper crash or error message, sometimes they cause software to start accessing the wrong memory.
  • It's just some random crash that decides to manifest as an out-of-memory crash. This happens a lot and it makes these crashes very difficult to track down.

Since your images start going black before the crash, I'm tempted to think we're dealing with a #2 crash here. Maybe all these images we're saving out are hogging GDI handles and choking the system. If the handles or GDI objects assigned to Rhino keep going up and up as you write out these images, that'll be good supporting evidence. You can use the Windows 8 Task Manager to keep an eye on these values, or if you're running an older version of Windows I recommend installing Sysinternal Process Explorer in lieu of the Task Manager.

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