[Radiance-general] rcontrib malloc error

[Greg Ward]

Good catch, Galen!  I'm glad you found the explanation.  Meanwhile, I changed the code so that (hopefully) we won't get runaway ray counts even if there are surfaces with >100% reflectance or transmittance.

Cheers!
-Greg

> From: Galen Burrell <Galen.Burrell at arup.com>
> Subject: Re: [Radiance-general] rcontrib malloc error
> Date: March 23, 2016 5:48:33 AM PDT
> 
> 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
> 
> 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