We use arnold for rendering, which uses OIIO for texture caching.  A common
conundrum we face is what size to use for the texture cache. Too small, and
we get massive amounts of redundant IO read, which kills render
performance.  Too big, and arnold and the cache combined might consume all
available memory and go into OS swap, at which point you might as well kill
the render.

If we accept that swap is the equivalent of render death then it would
behoove a renderer to free some non-critical memory to avoid this. For
example, dynamically reducing the size of the texture cache.
Hypothetically, this would purge the oldest tiles until the reduced size is
achieved (presumably using the same method already used for determining
what tiles to purge when the cache maxes out.  FIFO?).  There would also be
a min cache size, which arnold would use prevent reducing the cache to zero.

So, the question: is it currently possible to reduce the size of an
existing OIIO texture cache?

And also:  is this a horrible idea?

-chad
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