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Bug Reports / Metashape constantly crashes during Point Cloud creation (MacOS, eGPU (RX 6800)
« on: October 06, 2023, 10:44:24 AM »
Hello,
I´ve been using Metashape for a couple of months and unfortunately my machine increasingly crashes during Point Cloud creation (which was definitely not the case at the beginning) - maybe someone has a clue how to fix or circumvent my issues. Coming to the details:
1) Hardware: Intel Mac Mini late 2018 (6‑Core 3,2 GHz 6‑Core Intel Core i7; 64GB Ram) plus eGPU (AMD RX 6800 (16gb) in a Razer Core X case (Thunderbolt 3)). The machine is solely used for drone image processing, no other software is installed except from MacOs, metashape and Firefox.
2) Data used where the issue is recurring: Mainly multispectral imagery (tifs) gained from a P4M drone. Imagery used as "Multi-camera system".
3) Main Project: Reed belt monitoring -- 2 transects, each transect comprised of approx. 1500 (x5) tif images (approx. 250 x 900m each, flight height approx. 66,5m).
4) Issue: Flying the aformentioned transects every month and processing the gathered data as described in the respective metashape tutorial at quality level "High" (becasue I am in need of possibly high-res DEMs). Everything went very well for the first datasets (April (2x), May (2x)) but then Metashape (or my machine or both? - as I don´t know the exact cause) kept starting to crash during Point cloud creation. At the beginning it helped when saving the project under a new name, restarting the machine and repeating the mentioned step. However, this is not the case any more as my machine constantly crashes during this step of processing. In detail, the processing window of metashape freezes for a short moment (approx- 1-2 secs) and then the fans of my eGPU (and machine?) go wild for a fraction of a second (it sounds similar to a person exhaling) before the machine automatically restarts. After restarting, most of the time the infamous apple crash report appears but (at least for me) no viable information can be gathered (just stating something about a kernel panic, cpu1.. that´s it. Sometimes it comes out longer, sometimes very short). I also tried the etre-check app but couldn´t observe any general problems with this machine..
5) What I tried: Updating of Metashape and MacOs (which supposedly even made it worse somehow?? (as I already described, when the issues started I had luck sometimes and it successfully completed point cloud creation (pcc) after restarting). When setup pcc in quality level "Medium" everything runs smoothely without any issues. The first processing step of photo alignment also works at all quality levels (also highest / ultra). PCC at level "high" also works when disabling the eGPU (via metashape preferences) but takes ages (10 hours for a single dataset compared to approx 40-50 minutes for pcc using the eGPU). My machine uses all cores (respectively threads) at 100% most of the time (either computing with or without the eGPU), showing an avg. temp. of approx. 60 deg. celsius. The only thing I observed is that when computing with eGPU the machine even gets a little bit warmer (up to 63 deg.) -- May this cause the kernel to panic?
I further split up the data just to watch if kernel also panics with much less data to be processed - sometimes it finishes one part without crashing but then crashes during processing the other one.
What I generally do at the very beginning is to re-project my data from WGS84 to a customized ETRS89 projection applying a local geoid before photo alignment<-- but I assume this doesn´t affect further processing at all?
It is really a pity because the eGPU is exclusively used for this purpose in order to significantly save up processing time and energy consumption of my machine and now it seems +/- worthless.
Any hints are very appreciated...
Thanking you in advance, Michael
I´ve been using Metashape for a couple of months and unfortunately my machine increasingly crashes during Point Cloud creation (which was definitely not the case at the beginning) - maybe someone has a clue how to fix or circumvent my issues. Coming to the details:
1) Hardware: Intel Mac Mini late 2018 (6‑Core 3,2 GHz 6‑Core Intel Core i7; 64GB Ram) plus eGPU (AMD RX 6800 (16gb) in a Razer Core X case (Thunderbolt 3)). The machine is solely used for drone image processing, no other software is installed except from MacOs, metashape and Firefox.
2) Data used where the issue is recurring: Mainly multispectral imagery (tifs) gained from a P4M drone. Imagery used as "Multi-camera system".
3) Main Project: Reed belt monitoring -- 2 transects, each transect comprised of approx. 1500 (x5) tif images (approx. 250 x 900m each, flight height approx. 66,5m).
4) Issue: Flying the aformentioned transects every month and processing the gathered data as described in the respective metashape tutorial at quality level "High" (becasue I am in need of possibly high-res DEMs). Everything went very well for the first datasets (April (2x), May (2x)) but then Metashape (or my machine or both? - as I don´t know the exact cause) kept starting to crash during Point cloud creation. At the beginning it helped when saving the project under a new name, restarting the machine and repeating the mentioned step. However, this is not the case any more as my machine constantly crashes during this step of processing. In detail, the processing window of metashape freezes for a short moment (approx- 1-2 secs) and then the fans of my eGPU (and machine?) go wild for a fraction of a second (it sounds similar to a person exhaling) before the machine automatically restarts. After restarting, most of the time the infamous apple crash report appears but (at least for me) no viable information can be gathered (just stating something about a kernel panic, cpu1.. that´s it. Sometimes it comes out longer, sometimes very short). I also tried the etre-check app but couldn´t observe any general problems with this machine..
5) What I tried: Updating of Metashape and MacOs (which supposedly even made it worse somehow?? (as I already described, when the issues started I had luck sometimes and it successfully completed point cloud creation (pcc) after restarting). When setup pcc in quality level "Medium" everything runs smoothely without any issues. The first processing step of photo alignment also works at all quality levels (also highest / ultra). PCC at level "high" also works when disabling the eGPU (via metashape preferences) but takes ages (10 hours for a single dataset compared to approx 40-50 minutes for pcc using the eGPU). My machine uses all cores (respectively threads) at 100% most of the time (either computing with or without the eGPU), showing an avg. temp. of approx. 60 deg. celsius. The only thing I observed is that when computing with eGPU the machine even gets a little bit warmer (up to 63 deg.) -- May this cause the kernel to panic?
I further split up the data just to watch if kernel also panics with much less data to be processed - sometimes it finishes one part without crashing but then crashes during processing the other one.
What I generally do at the very beginning is to re-project my data from WGS84 to a customized ETRS89 projection applying a local geoid before photo alignment<-- but I assume this doesn´t affect further processing at all?
It is really a pity because the eGPU is exclusively used for this purpose in order to significantly save up processing time and energy consumption of my machine and now it seems +/- worthless.
Any hints are very appreciated...
Thanking you in advance, Michael
