RAM Usage - Building Textures

[Dieter]

You can only change your paging file, which is the memory that is swapped to the hard drive when your memory is full. The paging file is located in a file on the hard drive. This file is normally managed by windows and this does not seem to work properly in cooperation with metashape.

I can only show you the German terms that I translated with Google, but you should find that.

1) Windows Search: Advanced System Settings

2) Advanced tab

3) Tab performance

4) virtual memory change

5) choose a drive (preferably SSD) and set the initial size to 1.5 x your RAM, for me 64GB * 1.5 = 96 GB. Then you set the max size to a value that is sufficient for you, 200GB is enough for me.

So you have a total memory of: RAM + Paging File, for me 64GB+200GB=264 GB.

I've never needed more than 230 GB.

You can check this in the Task Manager under the Performance tab.


There you will see your memory "in use" and "committed"


In use means: This is how much memory you use from your RAM

Comitted describes the RAM and the paging file:

XX Ram is in use at the moment / XX Ram will be deployed at the moment

Just observe, that's actually self-explanatory.


I use windows 11, not much should change with windows 10.


Dieter

[Tas]

Ah, I thought you were referring to an Agisoft-specific setting! I'm aware of what the system paging file is, but I admit that I've never considered changing it. I have a professionally built workstation, but the maximum file size seems to be (mistakenly) set far too low - thank you for the tip! I'm attaching a snapshot for anyone who might be referencing this thread in the future. I'll have to look into this more, since I'm not sure that using the RAM size as the guideline for paging file size makes sense for me (I'd be allocating 768GB at 1.5 x 512GB). For now, I'm going to set it to System Managed until I run into another error.

I also came across the following resource, which documents a supposed workaround for processing with "limited" RAM. The general process is includes setting up a single computer for network processing. To be clear, we're not processing on a network - just setting up the software to function as if it is. The single computer gets set up as both the server and the node, but the project is split into processing steps (not "chunks").

Network Processing on a Single Computer:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRIC-qkZJ8

Question: Has anyone leveraged this process? Is there any reason why I wouldn't want to default to this procedure for all large projects?

[CheeseAndJamSandwich]

What Tas is on about is good advice!
Locally running Metashape in network mode helps a lot!

This trick has worked very well and actually can speed up your jobs by a decent amount... With a little bit of adjusting how many worker nodes are available for each stage of the processing.

Hopefully, as we've demonstrated that there's quite a big lump of performance being left on the table with Metashape running in the normal way, that they'll implement the otherwise common feature of spawning several worker threads on the computer, with the number set to what the hardware, cpu core count, ram, vram, etc. works best with, and automatically adjusting the number of thread for each task/subtask... Which will then obviously be happening on each physical node/computer in a network setup.  So lots of nodes, each with many worker threads.

Bzuco got me into testing this, and i got some great results when running the trial of Metashape Pro.
https://www.agisoft.com/forum/index.php?topic=16384.msg70457#msg70457

And i added a feature request:
https://www.agisoft.com/forum/index.php?topic=16928.msg72467#msg72467