Answered Those who have 64Gb of RAM, how much does VAM use up?

[Murasaki]

Hello! I'm having some issues with VAM eating up my 32Gb of RAM pretty quickly and eventually becoming very laggy and prone to crash. So, I was wondering if those with 64Gb have the same issue as well or not.
I don't know if something is wrong on my end or maybe I've just collected too many assets and stuff over the years but I'm considering picking up another 32Gb of RAM if that could help.

 

[HolySchmidt]

I'm having 32GB as well, no problems at all

 

[Lytanshade]

My VRAM very quickly fills to 100% when I'm playing dress-up and skinning models. My 32GB System RAM usage doesn't tend to go over 60-70%.

Getting into the habit of clicking 'Unload Inactive Objects' on the bottom right on the 'Control & Physics 1' tab on the Person Atom fixed my crashing issues. Like every few outfits or skins hit that to flush out your VRAM.

 

[Plato'sCave]

I saw a tip somewhere that said if things start to get a bit slow, usually after having loaded multiple scenes then going to the main menu, file (open/save) tab & then pressing the Hard Reset button can fix things, works for me if things get a bit slow.

 

[HolySchmidt]

You could also try to empty the local cache, main menu I think.

 

[Murasaki]

Thanks for all the replies! I do a lot of animation and that usually also involves changing models and messing around with outfits so I guess doing all that is probably too much for VAM.

Unfortunately neither a hard reset or the "Unload Inactive Objects" seem to help much though. Almost seems like a memory leak, now that I'm looking at it more.
The memory consumed just keeps going up and up until I shut the game down and restart it properly.

 

[HolySchmidt]

What GPU do you have? How much VRam?

 

[Murasaki]

What GPU do you have? How much VRam?

Recently upgraded to an RTX 3070Ti. It has 8Gb of VRAM. Never actually checked how much of the VRAM is getting used up on the GPU to be honest.

 

[HolySchmidt]

Ok but should be enough anyway ...
Are you still working with a HD or do you have a SSD?

My advice if you have a SSD: make a clean installation and copy everything you really need to it. Try again and tell us if there is a difference.

 

[Sally Whitemane]

I agree with @HolySchmidt - 32 GB is enough.

VAM casually eating 32 GB isn't normal - at least not initially. After a long session and loading a bunch of scenes perhaps.
Maybe you have some 'rogue' asset / (session) plugin loading stuff to your RAM?
Or maybe try to remove a bunch of var's from AddonPackges to a temporary folder and then restart to see if it improves.
For me having a huge pile of assets installed just increases the initial load time - but not RAM consumption (At least not by a relevant amount).

I do have 64 GB RAM, but for other reasons. For normal use of VAM it's not needed at all.
No matter how much RAM you have - it is possible to crash VAM by loading new(!) content over and over.
(I've tried to crash it on purpose. The 'stress' test scenes on VAM Hub with many models managed to crash it - 64 GB was maxed out and it just frooze)

my experience:
RAM
8 GB - barely runs, expect it to crash
16 GB - solid, maybe borderline for very complex scenes
32 GB - ideal
64 GB - unnecessary luxus

VRAM
8 GB+ = safe! Never managed to crash VAM by filling up the VRAM. More VRAM will keep more content/textures in memory and the load times are better if you *switch back* to content that was already used.

 

[TToby]

This is a very delicate topic, as it was discussed very emotional in other threads. 16 GB SHOULD be enough for VaM in theory, as for most other well coded applications (this is obviously the emotional part). It is VaM having a well known "memory bug" for years, that fills up your memory with cached data until it crashes, instead of freeing up memory. So it is not a matter on how complex a scene is, but of how much data will be loaded into memory. Loading several small scenes in a row and/or playing "dress up doll" is as worse as loading maybe one complex scene. 32GB is ideal for VaM to have a comfortable overhang on memory, before the bug crashes your session. In an ideal world you wouldn't need that much.
It is really only this, you won't see barely any difference in speed or even quality with more RAM in VaM.

If you don't want to spend the extra money and/or if you are unsure on how to mix different RAM modules, just press the "Unload inactive objects" button in the main menu from time to time after loading a lot of stuff. Personally I have successfully used VaM for years even with only 16GB, before I updated to 32GB last year.

 

[Murasaki]

My advice if you have a SSD: make a clean installation and copy everything you really need to it. Try again and tell us if there is a difference.

Will give this a shot during the weekend, thanks. Also, thanks everyone for all the help! Glad to hear that 64Gb is overkill because I didn't really want to spend money on RAM.

 

[Murasaki]

Maybe you have some 'rogue' asset / (session) plugin loading stuff to your RAM?

Messed around with my session plugins and it seems like you were right! The culprit seem to have been Hunting-Succubus' Subsurface Scattering session plugin. It's a shame because I really liked it but, whenever it was activated, it just started filling up my RAM until VAM crashed.

Do you guys happen to use the plugin too? I'm curious if it's just me or if this is a common issue. I was using the beta 13 version.

 

[Sally Whitemane]

Do you guys happen to use the plugin too? I'm curious if it's just me or if this is a common issue. I was using the beta 13 version.

Unfortunately I do not have that paid Plugin and therefore I cannot test it.
I use a slightly modified version of the Hunting-Succubus.AutomaticBodySmoother.7 session Plugin on my main VAM install that seems to work fine.

To have accurate numbers I've tested my memory consumption with a clean VAM.
The numbers are from the Windows 'Resource Monitor' -> Memory -> VAM.exe with:

• fresh VAM 1.20.77.9 copy without Plugins, Assets, Looks, etc. installed
• User Preferences tab: Reset All Settings To Default & Clear Cache
• File (Open/Save) tab: Hard Reset
• VAM in 1920x1080 Desktop mode on Windows 10 21H1 Build 19043.1645
• Windows 10 paging file was disabled to force the use of real RAM and avoid swapping
  Spoiler: Why?

  This is my 24/7 config because 64 GB RAM is enough to make sure no normal program runs out of memory, I do this to potentially preserve the SSD lifetime by avoiding unnecessary writes to the paging file, would not recommend for 32 GB since running out of memory without the ability to swap to disk will crash programs earlier
• fresh restart after all the above

VAM at main menu (do not opening anything):
Commit (KB): 2.936.532 / 2.94 GB

VAM after 20x reloading the Default Scene with the main menu button:

• To go back to the main menu I used the 'U'-key UI with the bottom left 'Star'-button
• I did on purpose not open/touch any other menus to avoid VAM loading more stuff/screwing up the test
• The following warning should pop up that I ignored on purpose: "Attempted to load plugin when plugins option is disabled. To enable, see User Preferences -> Security tab"

Commit (KB): 6.447.056 / 6.45 GB

VAM after 40x reloading the Default Scene with the main menu button:
Commit (KB): 6.461.836 / 6.46 GB

VAM after 100x reloading the Default Scene with the main menu button:
Commit (KB): 6.480.556 / 6.48 GB

VAM after loading all scenes once from the scene browser:
Yes, this test takes time. The idea is to keep loading new content to the RAM.
Commit (KB): 38.641.592 / 38.64 GB

Now it would be interesting to see that last test with only 32 GB RAM installed. But I don't want to mess with my PC hardware and remove 2 of the 4 RAM sticks. You know how it is - don't touch anything if it works

Being an idiot I forgot to try 'Hard Reset' after the last test. So I did another quick test where I filled up ~17 GB RAM by loading various scenes.
Pressing 'Hard Reset' did indeed lower the number to normal 6.5 GB.

I have an idea for a Session Plugin that could solve the 'RAM is filling up'-problem automatically. Just not sure whether it works / is possible yet.
Needs more research time, digging through decompiled VAM code and understanding it ...