I am wondering if any of you are seeing a memory leak in the photoview360.exe and photoview360_cl.exe processes.

I am rendering a large number of frames, in the 4000 plus range.  As I get deeper into the process the rate that frames gets saved off gets progressively slower.  This is not an issue of the render buckets taking longer to process because of more complex data.  The frames I am rendering take 10-30 seconds for the buckets to process and about 1-2 minutes to do all the data transfer between SolidWorks Motion Manager and PhotoView 360.

In Windows Task Manager under Processes, in the Memory column, I can watch the photoview360.exe and photoview360_cl.exe use progressively more memory with each frame.  I am using a rendering node with 48 gigs of RAM, so I do not see the data transfer slowdown until I get 10-12 hours into the render.  From my observations, of the task manager, when the photoview360.exe and photoview360_cl.exe processes gets above 5-6 gigs of RAM it starts slowing down the data transfer process.  The bucket render process is not slowing down.

If I toggle the Show Preview and Final Render Window check box in the PhotoView Progress dialog box this flushes the working memory. With it checked you are running  photoview360.exe with the full UI. With it unchecked you are running photoview360_cl.exe (command line) without the UI.  Toggling the check box starts and stops those programs which flushes the working set memory.  Then the data transfer process between programs looks to speed up again.

This does not apear to be happening in PhotoView 360 2011, SP5.  I just did a huge 4400 frame project over this past holiday weekend and did not see any sign of that issue.  I had render nodes running for 40-50 hours, same render session, over hundreds of frames and did not see this kind of data transfer slowdown in PV360 2011, SP5.

For my systems it takes a while for the slow down to show itself.  But I am using render nodes with 48 gigs of RAM.  My customer who is also rendering out parts of this animation sees the issue sooner.  He only has 12 gigs of RAM in his systems.  I have confirmed this on at least 3 different workstations/render nodes.

What has changed between 2011 and 2012 in PhotoView 360 to cause this?

Yes, I plan to get with my VAR to report the bug.

Cheers,

Anna