Performance issues on Mac

[Matt]

Hi James,

I don't know what's causing this but we'll try to solve it. We should test the possibility that it's caused by the imported objects and populations in your scene. It could be - maybe - that disabling them is not having the same effect as fully deleting them.

Can you try the following?

1. The next time you see this slowdown, delete the populations (and any other imported object nodes). See if that changes anything for the better (e.g. RAM use, slowdown).

2. Save another version of your project after you deleted the populations and imported objects. Restart Terragen and load the version of the project where these things are deleted. If possible, continue working with this version for a while, and do some renders just like you have been so far (but without the objects). See if this changes anything for the better.

[james adamson]

Hi.
The population was the last thing I added to scene and the slowdowns were happening way before I got there.
That said it was at its worst with the population in place. As far as I can tell the 3d preview has no bearing on the issue.
When it was at its most severe terragen was idle and I could not open files on the mac without a severe delay. Every action had a very long delay even just moving the cursor.
At that point I quit terragen and memory use went down from 36 gb to 14. I reopened the exact same scene and memory went up
but only to 17 gb. I rendered a frame and memory went up to 26 gb.
Now I have had the same scene rendering for over 4 hours 108 frames and the memory is stable at 20 gb.
Previously I was rendering a low res frame every few minutes to check progress and this seemed to make the problem exponentially worse. I could be wrong of course and that could be a red herring. Whats odd is when I run Modo and Nuke at the same time the memory usage has gone much higher with no impact on basic Mac functions. The apps get sluggish of course but my mac will still operate normally outside of those apps.
Hope this helps.
Thanks again. This forum is awesome.

[james adamson]

Hi Matt I will try your suggestions though and see if that helps.
Ta.
James.

[Dune]

After working for a (long) time, especially on heavy scenes, it's good to shut down and restart, to flush memory.

[james adamson]

Hi Dune. Thanks. That does seem to be working. I have also taken the advice of others and reduced the thread count available to Terragen and that may be also helping. It is strange that non of my other apps have had the same effect on my system.
Like I said I have had extremely large Modo scenes one scene file was a gig and yes modo would grind to a halt but when Idle with the scene live in Modo I could perform other tasks on my Mac.
But at any rate restarting Terragen works and it seems to take a while for it to get sluggish again. So onwards and upwards.
Thanks.
James.

[james adamson]

Hi Matt. Sorry I have not tried your suggestion yet. I will take a look at it later today.
Trying to get something finished once done I will look at it and seem if that help.
Ta.
James.