Playblast MASH memory leak Maya 2018

[Anonymous]

I have this scene which is a little dense, but scrubs okay. When I got to playblast it, if you have the task manager open and look at Maya's memory usage, it balloons from about 4 GBs when the playblast starts all the way to 20+ GBs, and keeps growing until it crashes my Chrome browser and then eventually my entire workstation. I tried deleting all the MASH networks and playblasting it, and it seems okay, so there must be some sort of issue with a MASH memory leak. All the mash networks are instanced geometry, so I'm not quite sure why this is happening, any help would be appreciated, thanks! 

Using latest Maya 2018 update 5

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous

When Maya crashes does it generate an error report for you to fill out and submit to Autodesk? If so, can you please fill it out and let me know what the CER report number is?

Also, if you scrub or play the timeline do you notice any memory leaks as well or is it only when you playblast?

[Anonymous]

Well, turns out just playing through the timeline will cause it to accumulate memory until it crashes. I don't seem to get any sort of error report, would it be possible to send you a packaged project somehow for you to take a look? It'll just keep eating up memory until it crashes my system pretty much, I've also just tried it in 2019 and the same thing happens. Also, if you say get it to eat up a significant amount of memory, and file>new scene it won't release all the eaten memory, so your blank maya scene will be using the same 20Gbs+

Thanks!

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous

Sure thing!

There was a known issue with scrubbing the timeline and MASH having a memory leak but that was fixed with update 1 for 2018 so that makes me believe it may be your specific set up and/or machine.

When you get a chance, can you please zip and attach the scene file here or via dropbox/google drive or another file sharing program so I can take a look at it?

[Anonymous]

I sent a PM with a link to the scene, I had a friend try it out and it seems to have the same issue. Let me know how it goes, thanks!

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous

Thanks for sending me the file! I was able to scrub the timeline and get a playblast out without Maya crashing but the memory leak is there. I just have a ton of RAM in my system so after everything I was at about 93% memory usage and I can also confirm that it holds onto the memory despite flush commands and creating a new scene.

Out of curiosity, what are you using for a renderer? There was a similar issue in this thread, and it was actually an Arnold issue with a memory leak happening when Motion Blur was enabled. MtoA 2.0.1 fixed this issue.

[Anonymous]

 We use Redshift, we completely uninstalled Arnold because we don't use it. 

I've found that if you disable the visibilty of all the MASH instancers(or set the LoD to bounding box) it'll fix the issue, but it's not really a fix because I need them visible for my playblasts. 

Any ideas?

[Anonymous]

This seems to happen with any MASH network using an instancer.  Even just a simple scene where you create a MASH network of a sphere, switch the mode to instancer and then hit play.  You can watch the memory infinitely climb up.

-Dan

[Anonymous]

just tried making a sphere MASH instance in 2017, it doesn't appear to be effected. If you make the sphere that is instanced very dense it'll creep up maybe a MB or two every playthrough the timeline but if you file>new scene it released the memory so it doesn't seem to be effected

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous

Can you try saving out your scene in .MA format and then open it in 2017 and see if the same leak still occurs?

In the meantime I'm going to reopen the ticket we have on this issue because it seems to back in 2018 and 2019.

[Anonymous]

Saved a copy of the scene in .MA formats, seems like it's okay in 2017, I ran through the timeline playing every frame (unhid a few of the other instancers too) and the mem usage went up a tiny bit but not too bad, and making a new scene released the memory so I assume that's normal behavior. 

2018/2019 though, they got some issues

[mspeer]

Hi!

Maybe this is related to the problem the instances are slower in Maya 2018 than Maya 2017.

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous

Thanks for testing that! I updated our previously closed ticket on this issue with your info and that its either reoccurring since update 1 or this may be a new issue entirely but either way it is on the developers radar now and they can begin working on a fix!

[Anonymous]

Let's hope they find a speedy fix! Thank you for the help Sean!

-Tony

[fleity]

I've encountered the same issue today. Initially I thought the reason might be that I created the the network from referenced the geometry but in fact the used up ram accumulates with a simple cube as well (just not as fast). All in all this is very weird since I ran a flocking sim last week with hundreds of fish using Mash and did not face that issue (or at least I never noticed it) and now I struggle with 50 cubes (over +1000 frames though)

The cause of the problem is probably connected to the instancer node (specifcally the geometry display as tony already figured out), the repro mesh works fine (might be a workaround depending on how heavy the meshes are)

opening a new scene does not release the memory for me. The only way is to close maya and reopen it. 

[Anonymous]

Almost a year later, MAJOR memory leak issue with with MASH and MAYA 2019. It seems to happen when I turn on and off a MASH network (I have 2 on my scene). Also, DO NOT use the optimize scene command if you're working with MASH. It will delete most of your MASH stuff. I am using Maya 2019.3.1

Will test on Maya 2020 see if the issue persists.

[Anonymous]

Happened to find this leak too. MASH plus Instancer creates a memory climb that can't be reversed.

It's still there in last 2019 SP and 2020 sp1.

[james.deschenes]

This is still a major issue in Maya 2020.2 as well and pretty much makes MASH unusable in a production pipeline.

[kelly_hynes]

Hi all,

This is a known issue and has been fixed in our upcoming public releases.

MAYA-103264 MASH: Memory leak on Distribute Node

Regards,

Kelly

 

[james.deschenes]

Since Mash is distributed as a separate plug-in, is it possible to get compiles of Mash with the fix for 2018 and other Maya versions within the Maya subscription window?