releasing resources takes forever.

[Anonymous]

We're currently doing some heavy rendering, memory wise, where we have jobs using 100+ gb of ram and we're running into problems with arnold taking a really long time "releasing resources" at the end of each frame. So it takes 17.5 minutes to init the scene, 3.5 minutes to render and then 12 minutes to "release resources". That's more then a 50% overhead on our render times for every frame.

In vray there's an env var called "VRAY_TERMINATE_ON_FRAME_END" that deals with this by just quickly dumping all memory used when the render is reported as done, instead of slowly releasing it.

Is there a similar env var or approach we could take with arnold after the log spits out "render done"?

[thiago.ize]

I know we already answered this on another email list, but in case other people have this same question, the answer was that no, there is no way to do this. At the moment the only good solution, which admittedly is not always an easy one, is to switch from Windows, where this is slow, to Linux where this overhead is essentially gone.