Excess memory usage when visualising vtkCubes or other objects

mastrogiorgis · August 6, 2020, 9:04am

Hi,

I noticed an excessive usage of memory when using vtkCubes to visualise an 8x8x2 blocks as seen in the image.

The memory usage is ~ 380Mb

Is there anything I can try to reduce this?
Many thanks.

lassoan · August 6, 2020, 12:14pm

380MB total memory usage for a 3D visualization application is pretty good. You may be able to reduce it by loading only certain VTK modules, but probably this would require VTK9 and/or custom VTK build.

mastrogiorgis · August 6, 2020, 2:42pm

Hi Andras and thanks for the info. I noticed that cubes take a while to visualisation when I get a 25x25x6 sized geometry. Is there a way I can accelerate this as I thought it was a memory issue at first.

PS. The memory when visualising the 25x25x6 is about 800mb

lassoan · August 6, 2020, 3:51pm

If you use a GUI toolkit as well then 800MB is understandable, but otherwise it seems a bit too high (if 25x25x6 means you visualize 25x25x6=3750 cells, which is nearly zero amount of data). Maybe you import a lot of libraries that are not strictly needed, which takes time and memory. To see what’s going on, you can have a look at the list of loaded shared libraries (see instructions for Windows here).

mastrogiorgis · March 21, 2021, 10:45pm

Hi again,
Revisiting this topic due to a similar but a bit confusing memory usage issue.

I noticed that the mem usage fires up (from 400 to 480mb) when I move/zoom in-out the vtkCubes drawing in a PyQt window while the mem usage remains the same if I use the vtk native one.

I’m using the QVTKRenderWindowInteractor.
Is this an expected behaviour?
Many thanks,