We are having problems with PowerMill crashing (most of the time without an error) or just locking up on us. We are running on Dell's with dual processors (3.6gig) and a gig of ram with Nvideo Quadro FX4400 graphics cards (512MB of memory). Our file sizes are really small (medical devices). We don't have Admin rights to our computers (this is the first time for me) and I am thinking that is our problem. Has anyone else had this problem. We are running XP professional. One last thing, when it is processing it seems to take much longer than it did when I ran it at other companies. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Ed

As a start, just in case someone has previously set a very small meshing factor, try:

EDIT MESH TOLFACTORLOW 0.5
EDIT MESH TOLFACTORHIGH 0.5

if that doesn't work get whoever has admin rights to reinstall the software, or send an example that keeps crashing to your local support office.

My computer locks PowerMILL up and crashes also but I was wondering if running a flex has any thing to do with it? If our networks slows down may that be what is causing me some problems? Also when this happens my file will not open back up. any thoughts?

Thanks
Par Man

There is only so much this forum can do. I recommend that you contact your local support office and provide them with as much information as you can.

we run a flex all the time with no issues. we have found that using dual processers has caused problems for powermill. no one would give us a explanation as to why. the only other time we crash is when we runout of swap space.

shred7500,

Paul might have put his finger on your problem. I would suggest that you do a test to determine if you have a RAM problem or not.

I would suggest:

1. Reboot machine to get clean starting point.
2. Bring up task manager to track memory usage.
3. Minimize task manager and boot PowerMill.
4. Let PowerMIll do it's thing. If it crashes, take a look at the peak commit charge value in the task manager. This might tell you if you have less ram than needed.

I have noticed that tolerances can cause PowerMill to eat a lot of ram. It might be possible to loosen some tolerances and still do a good job.

Please let us know how you make out with this test.

Regards,
Steven

P.S. I once used 2.5 gigs of ram calculating a single boundary.

All desktop PCs purchased for development contain dual processors, which has been the case for years and years, and I don't ever remember there being stability issues related to that. Do bear in mind that hundreds of hours of tests are run in PowerMILL every night on these machines, so this type of problem is likely to surface very quickly.

Paul,

You said that you experience crashes when PowerMill runs out of swap space.

Could this also be the case when you are running two processors? If I am not mistaken, both processors would be competing for the same total space.

As mentioned in other threads, I use 3 gig tuning to give max resources to a single session of powermill.

Even with three gigs allocated to powermill, I have still had crashes do to memory limitations.

Good luck finding the cause of your crashes.

Regards,
Steven

It's worse than that: each process (not processor) has its own virtual address space which on, say, XP is (up to) 2GB (or 3GB when using the magic boot switch). This is rather simplistic, but if the total amount of virtual address space required by all of the processes running on the computer exceeds the amount of RAM available, then swapping comes into play and this is what the page file is for.

Where things can go wrong (not an exhaustive list):

1) The page file isn't big enough - bear in mind that, in theory, this has to be able to store the entire virtual address space of all of the processes you're likely to run (at the same time) on your computer. So, if you are in the habit of running PowerMIILL all the way up to 3GB, then your page file must be able to accomodate this (at least). If the amount of swap space required by the OS exceeds the size of the page file, then things will start crashing.

2) RAM isn't big enough - as the size of a process (assuming that you are only using one big process at any one time) approaches the size of the RAM available, you will start to suffer performance issues as the OS struggles to juggle pages of memory between RAM and the page file (this is known as swapping). As the process gets bigger, things will get worse and worse to the point where processes become completely unresponsive. If things get really bad, it has been known for the OS to give up and then things will start crashing. Do bear in mind that cranking up your page file size cannot compensate for not having enough RAM.

3) A process exceeds the maximum amount of virtual address space it is allowed to have (2/3GB). However, if your page file is smaller than this and/or you are short of RAM, then things probably won't even get this far.

Your company paid good money for dual processors and graphics card, but really dropped the ball on the cheapest and most important item: RAM. I believe adding 1 more gig will cure the problem.
Nick's advise is spot on.

Cheers,
Kirk

The most important is PEOPLE, not hardware or software

we have had problems with dual zion processors.
we have since gone to single processors and maxed out memory. we run the 3g switch at times and have found this to be unstable at times. video driver falling into a continous loop (software/hardware issue NOT POWERMILL). we work with very large files. and have found that spliting them up (roughing,semi finish,finish)has helped. however we also create a cutter path, save file, close powermill, reopen powermill, and create another cutter path,do it again. we do this because powermill does not release memory or clear swap space

PowerMILL does release memory when it's not using it. Swap space is irrelevant in this particular discussion because programs have no real knowledge of it - the OS handles it "like magic" (that's not to say that design decisions shouldn't take memory virtualisation into account though).

If a program doesn't release memory when it's no longer using it, then that's known as a "memory leak". Delcam uses complex analysis tools to spot these types of problems.