[Radiance-general] rcontrib malloc error

[Galen Burrell]

Just an update on this error: After searching through my materials definitions per Greg's suggestion, I found that I had a glass definition of 95% light transmission, which resulted in a transmissivity of > 1.  Doh!  After reducing the light transmission to something more sensible I stopped getting the error.  Thanks Greg! 

Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2016 14:49:01 -0700
From: Greg Ward <gregoryjward at gmail.com>
To: Radiance general discussion <radiance-general at radiance-online.org>
Subject: Re: [Radiance-general] rcontrib malloc error
Message-ID: <4671033C-42AD-4540-94BD-C2554731B67F at lmi.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"

Hi Galen,

I've never seen rcontrib run out of memory in this way before.  What are your rendering options for rcontrib?  Do any of your surfaces have greater than 100% reflectance or transmittance?  This could cause the number of rays to increase rather than decrease on multiple bounces, which could lead to exponential memory growth during ray tree evaluation.

-Greg

> From: Galen Burrell <Galen.Burrell at arup.com>
> Subject: [Radiance-general] rcontrib malloc error
> Date: March 17, 2016 1:39:45 PM PDT
> 
> I?m running view matrix calculations using rfluxmtx/rcontrib for the 3-phase method and keep getting one of two errors:
>  
> 1)
> rcontrib(2346) malloc: *** mmap(size=a really big number) failed 
> (error code=12)
> *** error: can?t allocate region
> *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
> rcontrib: system ? out of memory in samp_hemi: Cannot allocate memory
> rcontrib: system ? read error from render process
> Killed: 9
>  
> 2)
> rcontrib: system ? read error from render process
> Killed: 9
>  
> I can?t establish a pattern for why/when these two errors occur.
>  
> Oddly, I don?t always get the error with some gridpoint files (with 5900 points), but I consistently get it with another gridpoint file (with 7500 points).  I don?t understand why grid size would influence memory though??
>  
> System is Mac OS 10.7.5 (2 x 6-core); error repeats on my laptop with 
> Yosemite installed Latest Radiance HEAD release; although the error 
> repeats on older versions from 6 months ago rcontrib settings are: ?n 
> 12 ?ab 12 ?ad 100000 ?lw 1e-5 ?I+
>  
> Any clues on why I?m getting these errors?
>  
> Thank you!
>  
> Galen

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