Mental Ray FATAL MEM Problems Again!

[lokm]

I encounter this infamous Mental Ray memory issue all the time on my 2Gig Ram machine with 1.5 MR memory limit:
0: STDOUT: MEM 0.3 fatal 031008: can't allocate 170806768 bytes.
0: STDOUT: MEM 0.3 fatal 031008: can't allocate 170806768 bytes.
0: STDOUT: ' FATAL : MEM 0.3 fatal 031008: can't allocate 170806768 bytes.
0: STDOUT: ' FATAL : MEM 0.3 fatal 031008: can't allocate 170806768 bytes.

After reading some suggestions on the web, I tried playing with the optimization settings... enabling Dynamic BSP, memory limit, heavy scenes optimization, memory maps conversion, etc... but the problem still persists for frames that are heavy.

It seems like no one solution works for all users having this issue. I hope Softimage / Mental Image can provide a consistent strategy in guaranteeing reliable processing of scenes of any size. I understand using virtual memory would very likely corrupt the render, but is there a setting that can enable MR to render using more RAM than the physical memory?

[kim aldis]

it's very difficult to know what the cause of this might be without knowing something about your scene but the problem is basically mental ray running out of memory. This could be size or complexity of scene, size and number of texture images, how many consequetive frames you're trying to render of it could just be you've found a memory leak.

I'll happily look at a scene for you if you can put it somewhere I can get it.

[lokm]

I was hoping MR would handle the errors and exceptions properly so it wouldn't die unexpectedly leaving users in wonder. I found the cause of the fatal error for my particular scene. The scene uses a FG Map that grew too large as new points were appended to the file. MR hits the memory limit easily after loading all the FG points from the file before rendering.

Anyways, thanks a lot for your help!