CC 2014 RAM Previews take too long to Start processing

[Alex Zvyk]

Hey Walter, me again. Discovered Details button, which shows what current memory usage is, and looks like it is less than 1GB out of 24GB total.

AE is allowed to have 17.99GB according to Details tab.

With 4GB allocated per core, 4 cores should have taken 16GB, which is convincingly less than the 17.99GB allowed.

And yet, AE still reports only 3 cores used.

Sorry being anal, just would like to understand how this works. Right now looks like it still does not add up.

[Walter Soyka]

The Details window elaborates on Ae’s memory usage. It does not tell you anything about how much RAM the OS and other applications are using.

You have told Ae that it, together with Pr/Pl/AME/Sg/Ps, can use up to 18 GB of your total 24 GB of system RAM, and that it must allocate at least 4 GB per background process.

However, if other running applications have consumed more than 6 GB, there will not be 18 GB available to Ae. If you are using, say, 9 GB of RAM outside of Ae, then there will only be 15 GB of RAM left for Ae to take, which is enough for 3 background processes at 4 GB each, but not 4.

Additionally, I think (but am not positive) that Ae has some internal requirement for how fragmented the memory can be. If the memory is available, but in lots of small chunks instead of fewer bigger chunks, Ae may not be able to use it.

So how to get that fourth process running?

1) Get more system RAM (unless you’ve maxed out the motherboard)

2) Free up more RAM. Reboot, leave other applications closed, launch Ae.

3) Lower the RAM allocation per background CPU. Maybe you can get by with 3 GB per CPU instead of 4. You can also tweak what values are shown in the pulldown by editing the preference file — just search for “Allocation Per Background Process” and you’ll see the list of six presets — so you could make this 3.5 GB or 3.75 GB if you wanted to.

On this last point, just note that some renders are more memory-intensive than they are CPU-intensive. In those cases, the best use of limited resources may be fewer CPUs running with more RAM. There is no one “correct” setting here.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Ian Mapleson]

My main thought on this is that, with modern sw techniques now available, it really
ought to be possible to code the app so that it can learn by itself what the optimal
settings are as one’s work progresses, in all sorts of ways.

For largely non-technical users (ie. those who cannot be expected to understand how
much RAM a particular scene might require to render), the most appropriate question
is likely to be, what are the generally overall best settings, and what are the
plus/minus consequences of deviating from these?

Really though, the app itself ought to be able to learn & adapt; the parameters that
controlled this process could be adjustable, but expecting every user to hard fix
these settings isn’t realistic now, the whole process is too complicated and technical
IMO (eg. re your comment about fragmented memory).

Ian.

——–
SGI Guru

[Walter Soyka]

Ian, I absolutely agree with you on all that. The way multiprocessing works is certainly naive, and not at all user-friendly. I don’t love it (or even really like it), but it’s what we have, so I’m trying to make the best use of it that I can, and help others do the same.

There’s still tons of room for improvement, but looking at Ae’s development over the last five years or so, I think Adobe has done some encouraging work on performance (64-bit, cache, background rendering, background analysis). About a year ago, then-product manager Steve Forde started a conversation with the community about performance [link] and got a lot of feedback, so the team is certainly aware of the continuing need for improvement here.

As always, I’d encourage you to share your feedback directly with the Ae team via feature requests [link]. The more specific you are about how you’re working and how you’d like to work, the better. Every single one is read, logged, and tracked. It’s a big ship and it turns a little slowly, but I do think the Ae team is very user-focused right now. Bug reports and feature requests are the best tool we have for influencing Ae’s development.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]