Version 5.0 Pro+ plug-in; Can not get free memory - resolved

Mike Bailey · Post by **Mike Bailey** » Fri May 27, 2005 9:06 pm

I see this was a bug reported with earlier versions, however I had never experienced the error, which is a message box that comes up when trying to use the Pro+ version 5.0 plug-in to process a 16-bit tif (20D) in CS1. "Neat Image can not get free memory block from the operating system. (54027968=byte memory block is requested)." If I immediately go to the standalone version, without changing anything else, the image can be processed. This is with leaving CS1 and Capture One SE running. So it would appear to be a new plug-in problem.

If I close all images and only have CS1 running, then reopen only one image, the error will be repeated if I try to run NI on the one image. After it has occurred, I need to close CS1 and start completely over before I can use the NI plug-in to process an image. I use the auto-match profile function to get the right profile. Typically these are ISO 400 and 800 images.

This is on a W2K SP4 system with 1.5 gig of memory, ATHLON XP 2800 CPU, more than ten gig of hard drive space free on all drives. CS1 did have 85% of memory allocated. I reduced this to 75%. However, when I checked with task manager only 759300K was in use, which means about 741000K was free. This occurs randomly, and can occur when I've only processed a few images, starting with Capture One SE (which I've used for a long time). I never had this message appear with NI Pro+ v4.2 or any other version. This has only started happening after I installed versioin 5.0.

I redid all my custom profiles, made using the NI target, but I assume this should not be a problem?

Mike

Post by **NITeam** » Fri May 27, 2005 10:55 pm

This is not a bug in the plug-in, this is a situation when either Windows or Photoshop really cannot provide requested memory to the plug-in.

We did introduce certain changes to memory management procedures in v5.0 and it now more heavily relies on Photoshop memory than on Windows memory. This means that Photoshop has to be able to provide enough free memory to the plug-in to let it work.

Try to change the amount of RAM given to PS. Try both to increase the amount to 90-95% and to decrease it to 50%. This may help.

We will try to reproduce this effect on our computers to see what exactly is going wrong in Photoshop.

Vlad

Mike Bailey · Post by **Mike Bailey** » Sun May 29, 2005 5:26 pm

Preview
Posted: Sun May 29, 2005 12:23 pm Post subject:
Hi Vlad,

Thank you for your response and suggestions.

After trying more and then less memory allocation in CS1, it seems that with more allocated as a percentage available, such as 70% and greater, eventually this NI5 plug-in memory problem will occur. Processing one file at a time, handed off by C1SE v3.6, keeping CS1 open all the time, running the NI5 plug-in on ISO400 files, sooner or later, the error occurs and I have to shut CS1 and start over to be able to use the NI5 plug-in.

With 60% of memory allocated to CS1, I didn't run into the problem after a few dozen images were processed. This is about all it takes to happen when 70% or more of memory is allocated to CS1. Possibly part of the problem is that one Photoshop takes memory from the system it doesn't give it back until it's closed down, even if no images are loaded and the buffers are flushed. But allocating less than 75% of memory to CS1 means it gets bogged down very quickly when processing images since it has to do a lot more swapping with virtual memory. So, less than 75% memory isn't really a solution. At the time I'm processing 16-bit 20D tiffs, so I start at 48meg in size for each image. CS1 edits eat up memory quite quickly after that.

Though I'm not sure of how CS1 manages memory, if it's not giving it back to the system, it's probably seriously fragmenting the memory it has allocated after enough time in one session. This might make it all the more difficult for the NI5 plug-in to get the size of memory block it wants?

Mike

Post by **NITeam** » Sun May 29, 2005 5:48 pm

Well, it seems that PS is indeed working worse than Windows itself concerning memory management. NI needs memory blocks and to get a block it has to ask PS to provide a block. Then the ball is on PS side, it can either provide a block or fail to do so. Once PS is not able to provide a block you get that error message.

What we could try in this situation is to prepare a special build for you. We would roll back some changes to make the new version of NI work with memory in the same way as v4.x did. Then you would check whether this helps and if it does then we could add an option or something like this to let you select the best way for NI plug-in to get memory blocks.

I will send you an e-mail when we prepare this special build and I hope it will help.

Vlad

Mike Bailey · Post by **Mike Bailey** » Mon May 30, 2005 6:54 pm

Vlad,

That's very good of you to offer a new build to resolve the memory allocation problem. An option to use the "old" memory allocation method would be an excellent idea. I was considering reverting to version 4.5 for that reason.

Mike

BobDWard · Post by **BobDWard** » Fri Jun 03, 2005 2:48 pm

I have run into the exact same problem with CS2....I have 1.5GB RAM and have CS2 set to only use 55% of the available memory. I have not had time to play with changing the memory allocation up or down yet though.

Post by **NITeam** » Fri Jun 03, 2005 4:57 pm

Please try to re-download the software, we updated it recently. This may resolve the issue.

Vlad

BobDWard · Post by **BobDWard** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 1:24 pm

Yeppers! Whatever changed seemed to have fixed the issue for myself. I could increase the memory in CS2 back up to 75% and it processed a set of about 30 images without problems this time.

Thanks for the quick fix!

Bob Ward