Inventor Professional 2018 memory leak? High RAM usage during single part FEA

- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Mute
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report
This is my first post here, so apologies if I've put this in the wrong place, etc.
Problem
As the title suggests, I'm running FEA on a single part in Inventor 2018, and coming up against some crazy RAM usage.
I have 16GB, and the FEAComputeServer process has been using up to almost all of that.
When running a parametric study, I've seen the DynamicAnalysisSolver process use up to 4.5GB, but this fluctuates between reasonable values; the FEAComputeServer on the other hand seems to use memory in a cumulative way and only ever increases. Moreover, the memory isn't released after the study has ended, and I have to end the process manually to free it.
This behaviour doesn't seem right to me - especially as in the worst case it has caused other open programs to crash, and even caused my PC to crash completely.
PC Spec
i7 4790K
16GB
GTX970
Inventor installed on a Samsung Evo SSD
Windows 10
Inventor version: Inventor Professional 2018 64 bit, Build 112, Release 16/02/2017
Attempts To Solve
The obvious first attempt was to reboot and run with nothing else open. Still get the high usage, but this time, instead of crashing at ~13GB, it crashes at 14.5GB or so.
I saw on another thread that using local files (i.e. not saving the project/part files on a network) may help, so I made a new test project on the SSD where Inventor is installed, and had the same issue.
A different thread suggested decreasing mesh size (increasing mesh density) - I didn't get the reasoning behind this, but I have tested different average mesh element sizes from 0.05 down to 0.002 and the problem persists.
Any insight here would be very useful, as I'm struggling to get any accurate results (high mesh density, lots of parameter values, etc) without Inventor crashing on me.
Thanks in advance,
C