REAPER ate all my ram!! (FIXED)

[weedboy]

Hello fellow reaperists,

I've been using reaper for several years now and am extremely happy with it.

Anyway, lately I think I encountered a memory leak bug.
Symptoms: Everytime I do an edit to audio item, Reaper's memory usage rises dramatically (around 10mb on a larger project, 1-2mb on smaller projects).
I edit audiobooks so I have one track with of lots of hours of heavily edited audio. Nothing else, only 1 instance of ReaComp. And the more complex and longer this audio track is, the more memory Reaper consumes after every edit. Actually, just selecting, deselecting audio uses same amount of memory. Other actions like creating new empty track, editing on this empty track, adding/editing markers, etc. does NOT cause the memory to climb (in a measurable way at least). So this must be connected to the fact that one audio track is VERY complex.

To free up memory I don't need to restart Reaper, just reloading the project is enough. And memory usage is normal again, before I start editing.

This started happening in 5.70 (5.62 works without problems). I also tried portable install without any extensions and default config. Didn't help. Running Windows 7 64 bit with 8GB of RAM. Reaper is 64 bit also.

Anyone experiencing this?
Thanks in advance for any help.

[4x4uk]

maybe turn off or imit undo history

[weedboy]

Originally Posted by 4x4uk

maybe turn off or imit undo history

Thanks! I tried turning off undo memory (setting to 0) and it fixed it. Memory use doesn't increase anymore. But it's not optimal since undo is too convenient

Anyway, seems like Reaper doesn't limit the undo memory usage as set in preferences? Doesn't matter if I set it to 128 mb or 8 mb it still increases seemingly without limit. Maybe the undo history memory limit is broken?

I also just tried 5.77 and it's still the same.

[weedboy]

Just wanted to bump the thread and also post some video evidence.
My first time embeding a gif, so hopefully it works:



As you can see, selecting, spliting etc. raises ram usage by 10+ mb every time. So I just run out of ram very soon. It is easy to dublicate with just copying lots of short clips to fill a couple of hours of timeline. Once the track becomes complicated enough, ram usage starts rising with every action on that track.

I also tried this on the newest build 5.79 pre8 and also on Mac OS. Same thing.

Incase embed didnt work:
https://media.giphy.com/media/fnDUrE...GkiL/giphy.gif

[RJHollins]

Maybe it is one of your Effects.

[Coachz]

Originally Posted by weedboy

Just wanted to bump the thread and also post some video evidence.
My first time embeding a gif, so hopefully it works:

<img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/fnDUrE5TxJX76fGkiL/giphy.gif" height="480 " width="371">

As you can see, selecting, spliting etc. raises ram usage by 10+ mb every time. So I just run out of ram very soon. It is easy to dublicate with just copying lots of short clips to fill a couple of hours of timeline. Once the track becomes complicated enough, ram usage starts rising with every action on that track.

I also tried this on the newest build 5.79 pre8 and also on Mac OS. Same thing.

Incase embed didnt work:
https://media.giphy.com/media/fnDUrE...GkiL/giphy.gif

To imbued use "[img]url[/img]" without quotes

[weedboy]

@Coachz -- Thanks! Fixed it.

@RJHollins -- i tried without any effects (no plugins, default reaper installation, no extensions), still the same.
Why i think it's a bug -- because 5.62 and earlier this never happened. And the memory use for reaper rises until it starts paging like hell and pc becomes unusable. (that's how i found out about it). I will be staying with reaper 5.62 for now, but it's not great in the long run, i already love some of the improvements in later versions.

[weedboy]

Ok, so I found out that the same thing happens with MIDI clips too. Just copy a bunch of empty 1 bar clips to fill a few hours of timeline and memory starts rising rapidly and past the supposed undo memory limit in the preferences. Also reproduced this on a random PC running windows xp 32 bit, fresh/default Reaper install. Don't know what else to do. Hopefully someone is experiencing this too and this gets some atention. Have a nice day everybody.

[dug dog]

Hey Weedboy:

I can confirm a BIG difference in behavior from version 5.70 to V5.76 (and V5.78).

I ran a test that started with a blank project and added a series of new MIDI items of 1 measure each until the project length had reached one hour.

RAM usage was as follows:

V5.70 Start 80 MB End 445 MB
V5.76 Start 73 MB End 1084 MB
V5.78 Start 71 MB End 1087 MB

[weedboy]

@dug dog oops, actually you are right, 5.70 is the last version without this behaviour (I said it was 5.62, must have missed the 5.70 one)

Anyway I found that you can easily see this in Undo History window. It's so exciting that I even made a youtube video showing this:
https://youtu.be/39zJ2y1HWIY
(empty project with a lot of empty midi clips)
I am pretty sure this should not be happening. My guess is that this leak is too small to notice in smaller projects but it's still there.


Edit: Also wanted to say that 5.75 had one change in Undo behaviour:
Undo: avoid over-compaction of undo history.
Maybe this introduced some regressions? Just speculating there.

[dug dog]

Originally Posted by weedboy

Also wanted to say that 5.75 had one change in Undo behaviour:
Undo: avoid over-compaction of undo history.
Maybe this introduced some regressions? Just speculating there.

Interesting.

I don't know much about the programming aspect or whether or not there's a bug. All I can say from my own tests is that, on an identical project, the amount of RAM used for Undo History has roughly doubled from V5.70 to V5.76.

Now, from a broader perspective, it took roughly 2000 steps/actions for me to gobble up a Gig's worth of RAM and I can't imagine a scenario in which I'd want to undo anywhere near that many steps.

For me, a more practical approach would be to auto-save a time stamped version of your project every couple of minutes and keep your undo history relatively light.

[Justin]

Edit: I just scrubbed through the .gif -- it looks like the two preceding items on the track (At least, possibly more!) have RX on them. The configuration state of RX is quite large -- I'd recommend moving those two items to another track if you're going to be editing other items on that same track. ( you could make it a child track, or move the RX items back when you're done editing...)

[weedboy]

@Justin -- good catch. The tracks have two instances of RX plugins, but the items themselves have no effects on them, they are just named RX (for me to know that i ran them through RX before).

I reproduced the same behaviour without any plugins, just 1 empty track and empty midi items. Youtube video shows it much better than those old gifs

Thanks for suggestions everybody. Those are good workarounds. Still gonna to stay on 5.70 for now though

[Justin]

Originally Posted by weedboy

@Justin -- good catch. The tracks have two instances of RX plugins, but the items themselves have no effects on them, they are just named RX (for me to know that i ran them through RX before).

I reproduced the same behaviour without any plugins, just 1 empty track and empty midi items. Youtube video shows it much better than those old gifs

Thanks for suggestions everybody. Those are good workarounds. Still gonna to stay on 5.70 for now though

They also have inactive takes, any FX on those? Can you post the .rpp? (or email it to support at cockos dot com)?

[weedboy]

There may be a few instances of ReaEQ only. I mean literally just a couple in the whole project.

I am not sure if you would need audio files. So I sent other RPP to support at cockos. Containing only midi items. Works the same way. Hopefully you can marquee select them and see ram rise to infinity. (and undo history too).

[Justin]

Originally Posted by weedboy

There may be a few instances of ReaEQ only. I mean literally just a couple in the whole project.

I am not sure if you would need audio files. So I sent other RPP to support at cockos. Containing only midi items. Works the same way. Hopefully you can marquee select them and see ram rise to infinity. (and undo history too).

Edit: Ahh I think I see the issue -- it's not properly compacting undo states? Thanks, fixing this, ugh sorry I was misunderstanding the original post!

[Justin]

If you check out the pre-release forum the 5.79 build there should fix this, thanks!

[weedboy]

@Justin -- Maybe I wasn't clear enough, english is not my native tongue. I just confirmed that latest 5.79 build fixes this. Thank you!

[Jason Lyon]

Bravo J.

Reported a month ago, discussed for a bit, noticed a few days ago, fixed in today's release.

Good work.