yet another memory-thread (maya)

Hiya all!

My dear linux seems to have run into problems somewhere... I thought that I should learn some 3d to kill time (a life.. what is that?) so I got maya 6.01 for linux (another thread about the findkey-util/problem is solved at last).. but I think that maya wants more memory becuase it quits without warning when memory is low ("free" that is.. lot's more in "cache"). I'm running arch 0.7 (2.6.9 kernel) with x.org 6.8.1 and fluxbox as my WM. At the moment I have 512mb DDR. Here are some output's.....

$free
             total          used         free      shared    buffers     cached
Mem:    513044     260972     252072          0      10172     153708
-/+ buffers/cache:    97092     415952
Swap:            0          0          0

No other programs running than opera, konsole, fbpager and wmnotify.. no swap is used and lot's of freemem and also in cached. Next is after maya6 is started...

$free
             total            used          free      shared    buffers     cached
Mem:    513044      430144        82900          0      11888     170896
-/+ buffers/cache:   247360     265684
Swap:            0          0          0

Not so much free left but still no swap used and more in cached... Now opera, maya6 and konsole is running.. okey.. so I start creating a bit in maya.. and also I look and some videos (tutorials).. this happens then:

$ free
             total          used          free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:    513044     501352      11692          0      12788     201412
-/+ buffers/cache:  287152    225892
Swap:            0          0          0

cached mem is going up and free is going down...... after more objects the program quits with the following reason:

maya encountered a fatal error

Signal: 6 (Unknown Signal)
====================================
Cause of memory exception
====================================
   5.246 Mb     Free Memory
   0.000 Mb     Free Swap
   0.547 Mb     Size of alloc
  10.000 Mb     Low Memory Threshold
====================================
Memory use when exception was thrown
====================================
====================================
 115.177 Mb     Peak total size(Estimated)
  26.484 Mb     Peak arena size
====================================
  39.095 Mb     Heap
   0.312 Mb     NURBS Geometry Cache
  24.609 Mb     MEL
   1.000 Mb     NURBS AG
   0.125 Mb     NURBS Surface Shapes
   0.125 Mb     Transforms
   0.312 Mb     Data Blocks
====================================

As far as I can understand theese numbers.. maya isn't getting enough memory... so to my question.. what shall I do? buy more RAM? -but in the latter case.. will I get more free or just more cached? or is there any setting that deals with linux/memory I can adjust?

Edit: Maya6 requires atleast 512mb of RAM...

/ Taz

I think you are using a very heavy desktop as KDE, aren't you? Try using Fluxbox/Openbox/Blackbox or XFCE4. They are quite attractive and use way less RAM. Even Konsole is heavy, you may want to give aterm a shot, it's quite of a looking terminal and is very light-weight.

If that still causes your problem, you've to disable services that you do not need. A good example is sshd, a daemon for remote administration on by default. Many, many users don't need it (I do, but not much lately).

If those things does not help, you need more RAM. Hopefully you use affordable RAM, because my P4 uses Rambus and Samsung overprices it to death, so no upgrades for my PC . Rants apart, I wish you luck!

your problem is you have no swap partition or none is mounted anyway

still no swap used

none used cause none available
Swap: (Total) 0
you just can't expect to run multiple apps and something like Maya without swap and not hit that wall eventually

Megaman -> nope.. as I wrote in my first post I'm using fluxbox the only reason for using konsole was that it is easier to copy/paste from there to opera.. the only deamons I can kill is the network and hotplug but they don't seem to take so much memory or? sshd is not running..

foo_bar_foo -> hmm.. I have a 1gb swap-partition and when arch boots it says "activating swap".. and it prints out "done". I also looked at "/etc/rc.sysinit" and the command is: "/sbin/swapon -a". I know that I selected that partition (hda5) when I first installed arch.. but something must be wrong be then? how can I see/check that? should the swap be mounted in fstab?

Oops, sorry my bad Tazzie76 . I'd stick with foo_bar_foo advice

Megaman -> heh.. just wrote an reply to foo_bar_foo ...

I see ghe. Well, I'm afraid that I cannot offer further help. It's a bit beyond my scope . I would not even dare to install Maya in my PC to see if I get similar errors, since I've only 256 MB and I am not going to upgrade it. Thanks Intel and Samsung for the expensive Rambus memories. Thanks to you I'm building a descent AMD machine

Megaman -> Okey.. I did some research before bed (looked at alias official forum) and they wrote that 1gb ram was needed.. and also that Maya ate more RAM on linux than on windows.. It think it was 250mb someone calculated it too.. and that sounds about right.. the -/+ buffers go straight up after starting Maya.. I have an AMD-system now and like it a lot.. didn't have so much money so I got only an AMD Duron 1800.. But it works good for me.. except for some memory-trouble with Maya now..

ahhh... you should mount swap in fstab.. I found a thread on arch linux's forum and there the swap-partition was written in fstab.. so I tried that and if i now write free I get this:

$ free
             total           used          free         shared     buffers     cached
Mem:    512020      213036     298984            0        7912     135364
-/+ buffers/cache:    69760     442260
Swap:   979924               0     979924

Hopeing Maya will be nicer now...

something must have been screwed up in the arch installation.. maya is much more stable now. new feature: maya 6 with swapspace (but not much used which is good)...