I guess you already know the answer to the question posted in the title of this post. I’m afraid the answer was yes. This week two users (thanks to both of you) reported to me that scenProc is quite hungry for memory, especially when processing big files. Even 16 GB of RAM would easily be filled in certain cases.

So I started to check where all this memory went and the reason was quite logical. ModelConverterX and scenProc share a lot of code, they use the same libraries for many of the processing functions.  But the data structures designed initially for ModelConverterX were not always optimal for scenProc as well. In ModelConverterX for each vertex information like the position, normal, texture coordinate and bone weight are stored. scenProc doesn’t need all this information, only the position is enough. But it was using the same class to represent the vertices. So that gave a huge waste of memory.

I have now optimized this and also changed a few other things how scenProc stores the lines and polygons. And the good news is that this results in a much better memory usage. A reduction of 50% to 70% is possible for most scripts. So I’m sure you’ll notice the difference. And processing times also slightly improved in most cases because the information is stored more efficiently.

So grab the development release tomorrow and have a look yourself. Oh, and please don’t fill up the RAM that you freed with even more data. Because I’m sure some of you will go to the limit again 😉