[Radiance-general] BSDF in child processes' memory

[Lars O. Grobe]

Dear Radiance mailing-list and website subscribers,

I am currently running some rather extreme case of a scene employing 
BSDF. Three rank 4, 2^7x2^7 tensors are loaded, and I run 40 rcontrib 
processes in parallel. From my understanding, since the BSDF does not 
change during the rendering, the processes' memory footprint should be 
light. However, after several hours, the processes have grown large 
enough to start the system swapping to disk. This is on a linux system 
with 64 GB.

What could make the processes create such massive amounts of data? Is it 
the caching or the cumulation to generate the pdf that modifies memory 
and thereby prevents using shared pages?

Besides, does Radiance detect if multiple material definitions reference 
the same XML file, or are these loaded separately for each definition of 
a BSDF type?

This was my first post after the migration of the list, I am really 
curious if it gets through :) Thank you Dan for the effort to set this 
up, and in particular to maintain the email-interface, which allows me 
to still get all this valuable information archived in my mailbox.

Cheers, Lars.