Only half of my available RAM being used?

[doktorinjh]

I've just upgraded from 8gb to 16gb of RAM and Windows 7 (Home Premium) sees it, the BIOS sees it, memtest86+ sees it (it all tests fine), the Task Manager sees it (16gb total, up to 8gb cached during processing, 8gb available during processing, very little free), but I never use more than 8gb of my 16gb. I've tried to reset the memory in the boot log of msconfig and all of the other standard places.

Do I need to reinstall Photoscan for it to recognize the new memory? Is there something else I can try?

Thanks for any help!

[doktorinjh]

I may have just figured out my own question, but maybe someone can confirm it?

I was under the impression that the program would use all available RAM to complete the processing, but it appears that the number of photos being processed is what determines how much RAM is needed, according to this Wiki page.

So, if I'm only processing 500 photos, I'll never need more than 2.5GB for photo alignment, 8GB for high quality height-field modeling, etc.

Does that seem right?

[Marcel]

Photoscan will only use what it needs.

8GB sounds low for 500 photos,  but perhaps your photos are small?

If you really want to know for sure,  up-scale your photos 400% and see how much RAM it uses then. 

[David Cockey]

The amount of RAM used also depends on the quality level selected, High uses more RAM than Low; and possibly on the number of cores/CPUs available. What settings are you using for processing?

[doktorinjh]

I've tried various settings as I'm figuring out what looks best for modeling houses and large tracts of land. Last night I ran Arbitrary modeling on a dense cloud for 304 cameras and it used about 11GB of RAM at a medium setting. The results looked very good, so I don't know if there would be a need to go above that setting (although I'll probably try, just for fun). That took about 7 hours of processing I'd guess.

Thanks for all of the advice!