From: Axel Kohlmeyer (akohlmey_at_gmail.com)
Date: Tue Feb 09 2016 - 05:09:50 CST

On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 11:44 AM, Eiros Zamora, Juan
<j.eiros-zamora14_at_imperial.ac.uk> wrote:
> Dear VMD experts,
>
> I’m getting a memory error when trying to render an image with Tachyon.
>
> My computer specs are:
>
> OS X El Capitan
> Version 10.11.1
> Processor 4 GHz Intel Core i7
> Memory 32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
> Graphics AMD Radeon R9 M395 2048 MB
>
> And I’m using the MacOS X OpenGL (32-bit Intel x86) (Apple MacOS-X (10.4.7
> or later) with hardware OpenGL (native bundle)) VMD installation.
>
> I’m trying to obtain a high-resolution picture for a poster so I’m using the
> following command:
>
> "/Applications/VMD1.9.2.app/Contents/vmd/tachyon_MACOSXX86" -aasamples 12 %s
> -format TARGA -o %s.tga -res 7680 4320
>
>
> And the error I’m getting is:
>
> vmd > Info) Rendering current scene to 'vmdscene.dat' ...
> Info) Tachyon file generation finished
> Info) Executing post-render cmd
> '"/Applications/VMD1.9.2.app/Contents/vmd/tachyon_MACOSXX86" -aasamples 12
> vmdscene.dat -format TARGA -o vmdscene.dat.tga -res 7680 4320' ...
> Tachyon Parallel/Multiprocessor Ray Tracer Version 0.99.1
> Copyright 1994-2014, John E. Stone <john.stone_at_gmail.com>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Scene Parsing Time: 10.0596 seconds
> Scene contains 8715544 objects.
> tachyon_MACOSXX86(86782,0xa2d6d000) malloc: *** mach_vm_map(size=35184640)
> failed (error code=3)
>
> Is this issue again related with the 32-bit build of VMD? Also I’ve tried

very likely. you are limited to a 32-bit address space despite having more RAM.
you can try one of the following things:

- make a copy of the vmdscene.dat file and transfer it to a 64-bit x86
machine and then repeat the raytracking command line, only this time
using the tachyon_LINUXAMD64 executable.

- go to the tachyon homepage and download the source and compile a
custom 64-bit executable for your machine and process the vmdscene.dat
file with it as listed in the console echo.

- reduce number of aasamples and/or size of the resulting image until
the error message goes away and then scale up and postprocess the
image with a suitable program

axel.

> googling the tachyon_MACOSXX86(86782,0xa2d6d000) malloc: ***
> mach_vm_map(size=35184640) failed (error code=3) error but nothing showed
> up.
>
> Thanks for any help on this,
>
> Juan

-- 
Dr. Axel Kohlmeyer  akohlmey_at_gmail.com  http://goo.gl/1wk0
College of Science & Technology, Temple University, Philadelphia PA, USA
International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste. Italy.