VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Apr 07 2014 - 15:23:42 CDT

Jacob,
  It is trivial to make a stripped down VMD build, but it won't have any
impact on your memory footprint in practice. Almost no difference in
the VMD memory footprint as a function of what features it is compiled with.
The other features don't use any measurable amount of memory unless they
are actually being used.

If you see a large VMD memory footprint, be wary that the values reported
by top include things like GPU video memory mapped by the video driver,
which looks huge but is completely artificial. Run VMD in text mode
and set the environment variable "VMDNOCUDA" to "1" and that will give
you a view from 'top' that is less confusing to look at.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Apr 07, 2014 at 01:42:47PM -0600, Jacob Durrant wrote:
> Is there a "minimal" version of VMD? Basically, I just want to be able to
> render VRML files from the command line. I want to do this on a webserver,
> so it needs to be fast and not use a lot of memory. I know VMD comes with
> a lot of great "extras" (e.g. multiseq, etc.), but I wonder if these
> extras require more time and memory to load than I can afford. Has anyone
> ever made a stripped-down version of VMD?
> Thanks,
> Jacob
> --
> ==============================
> Jacob D. Durrant, PhD
> Rommie E. Amaro Research Group
> University of California, San Diego
> Connect with me on LinkedIn
> jacobdurrant_at_gmail.com
> jdurrant_at_ucsd.edu 

-- 
NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/