So I’ve been struggling with this for a while and I think I found a solution.
Short version: remove VARs with too many morphs, namely those by Universens and noheadnoleg.
Longer version:
I wasn’t able to open scenes with more than 2 people in it, without getting the dreaded "Too Many Heap Sections". I’ve read that it was not about not having enough physical RAM, which I can confirm from my experience. I do have LOTS of VARs and I was pretty sure that was the reason, but I was not sure why.
I found a very interesting thread about VAM performance where MeshedVR explained that VAM performance wasn’t directly related to the number of VARs, but it is related to the number of morphs, including the ones in VARs and all duplicates. He recommends "disabling or removing VAR files that have a lot of morphs and you are not regularly using" (
https://hub.virtamate.com/threads/benchmark-clear-install-vs-many-vars.37256/post-103453 )
I assumed that if all those morphs needed to be applied, they probably had to be loaded in memory too, so this may be the cause of my problem.
So I put together a small Python script (I can share it if people are interested) to detect VARs that are bloated with morphs.
I noticed that some vars contain over 2000 morphs. MeshedVR recommends having less than 10000 morphs overall, so you see how quickly you gan get there with only a few of those.
It makes sense for some VARs to have lots of morphs, like AshAuryn’s expression stuff, or things that are clearly morph collections. But for some, it absolutely does not. A single scene should not contain 2000 morphs. The worst offender is Universens. Almost each of his VARs does. I guess, it’s not surprising when his VARs are often larger than 1Gb… Noheadnoleg seems to be a close second. I proceeded to remove most of these VARs, and it worked!
Now I’ve been able to open 3-person scenes that I had never been able to open before. And it seems to have helped a lot with FPS too (but I haven’t measured anything).
I’d also recommend removing older versions of VamX, which contains lots of morphs too (but that’s expected).
I hope this helps.
Edit: script added here:
https://hub.virtamate.com/threads/too-many-heap-sections.38525/post-108718