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Huge issue with Kontakt not unloading RAM

@rMancer OK I've now tried to repro your steps.

While I did get the same behavior of increasing RAM at every cut-paste, when reaching the max RAM that I have (64 gigs, that took a while), I did not get any message about crashing, instead already taken memory was reused/reallocated, which is the intended behavior of this new memory manager.
 
EvilDragon said:
@rMancer OK I've now tried to repro your steps.

While I did get the same behavior of increasing RAM at every cut-paste, when reaching the max RAM that I have (64 gigs, that took a while), I did not get any message about crashing, instead already taken memory was reused/reallocated, which is the intended behavior of this new memory manager.
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Hmm, I'm hesitant to try to reproduce it again on my end, given the frozen system and hard reboot last time.

One thing I did notice is that it seemed to work as intended at first; when I first hit the limit, memory seemed to be reallocated. But after repeating the copy/paste process a few more times once I was already at the limit, that's when I got the error messages, and then the total lockup.

But thank you anyway; I realize it's kind of an extreme/edge case, and even more so if you can't reproduce it. I've already caved and have got another 32gb of RAM on order anyway, due here on Thursday :cool:
 
Hey guys,
I am facing the same issue for some days now (didn't notice at first). This is such a pain....

I'm on Windows 11, intel i9 - 64Go RAM. Cubase 11 Pro - Kontakt 6.7.1
Basic memory usage = 6Go without anything ongoing.
After loading my project in Cubase = 46.9Go RAM. First trick, I already purged all instruments before so that only the samples I am using in the track are loaded.

After re-purging all instruments in Kontakt.... 37.2Go RAM used. Until... after like 10-20 minutes, my RAM dropped to 24.5Go as I was writing this comment.

And I won't tell you about my VE Pro template (also purged) killing my RAM when linked to Cubase when no/zero/none instrument has samples loaded. So I cannot use it any longer.

I unistalled Kontakt & some orchestral libraries, installed them again... nothing changed.

Do you have any news or should we takle NI's Support Team about this?

Thanks :)
 
I was having the same issues as @Azunald in Cubase 12 - purging all samples didn't actually purge memory. This happens in both 6.7.0 where elease notes say samples held for VST3 was fixed, but it wasn't. Updating to 6.7.1 seemed to fix it, though - although it seems like one instance of Kontakt still takes up more RAM than I remember.

EDIT: It looks like each empty or purged instance of Kontakt now takes up about a gig which is unfortunate. Using VST2 version does not change anything.
 
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Depends what sort of instruments you load, samples are only one part of the RAM load equation. If the instruments are extremely "thick" in amount of groups/zones/modulators/persistent variables in scripts/use a lot of TMPro voices/have large max polyphony, even fully purged they can take a solid chunk of RAM.

However, empty Kontakt instances don't take up 1 gig over here. Each additional instance I load is around 60-80 MB of RAM, empty. Oh, but if you are a heavy user of the Database, then yeah that one would take more RAM (if it has a ton of stuff in it), however this would still be only a one time RAM tax, only one instance requires to reserve memory for the database, this is then shared with all other Kontakt instances ran in the same host process.
 
No changes in K7. Please read the above - the memory is only displayed as taken but the new back-end memory manager in Kontakt only marks the memory as free to use by other processes. If another process requests more memory, OS will give it that.
 
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EvilDragon said:
No changes in K7. Please read the above - the memory is only displayed as taken but the new back-end memory manager in Kontakt only marks the memory as free to use by other processes. If another process requests more memory, OS will give it that.
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I'm still having this issue four years on from when it was first reported.

Do you know if there's any plans to fix this?

I'm happily working away on 6.3.2, but more and more libraries these days are being built in the latest version of Kontakt 6. ProjectSAM for example.

It's a real shame 6 was left in such a buggy mess when 7 came out.
 
There are not going to be any changes in this regard, as far as I know. As I explained, this is more a visual thing, but memory is being marked as unused, so other processes can reclaim it when they need it.

Modern memory managers work in mysterious ways.
 
EvilDragon said:
There are not going to be any changes in this regard, as far as I know. As I explained, this is more a visual thing, but memory is being marked as unused, so other processes can reclaim it when they need it.

Modern memory managers work in mysterious ways.
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Thanks for the update Mario but I'm certain it's more than a visual thing. I'll read over the thread to see if I can see what you mean.

The only thing that fixed it for me when my logic projects froze up forcing a hard reboot, was importing all session data into a new session, Kontakt 6 and all. It magically fixed it, only to become issue again after copying down enough instances of Kontakt 6.

I can run larger projects using only Kontakt 5 but as soon as I use the latest version of Kontakt, I have issues. I haven't run into any problems with Kontakt 6.3.2 yet.

The problem is that many libs made for Kontakt 6 these days are built in a later version than 6.3.2.

Many of my friends and colleagues have this same issue and it seems the only solution is to upgrade Mac OS and go to Kontakt 7.
 
Kontakt 7 has the same memory management that was introduced in Kontakt 6.4, though. Are you saying you don't experience the issue with K7?

EDIT: Just reading through old changelogs, it looks like there was a fix in K6.7 where "VST3 plugin did not release memory correctly under certain circumstances", and also a fix in K6.5 where memory was not being released correctly - might very well be related to what you're experiencing.
 
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I'm on the latest OSX 10.12 Sierra, Kontakt 6.3.2 and I was using whatever the latest version of Kontakt 6 that works with Sierra is. But I've seen the same issues on Kontakt 6.7 on Monterey on other machines. I also use AU format for Logic.

I've actually now started experiencing the same issue now with Kontakt 6.3.2 over the past few days. Importing everything into a new logic project fixes it every time though.

I'll have a look through the changelogs.

Edit: I haven't used/upgraded to 7 yet.
 
Fleahouse said:
I'm on the latest OSX 10.12 Sierra, Kontakt 6.3.2 and I was using whatever the latest version of Kontakt 6 that works with Sierra is. But I've seen the same issues on Kontakt 6.7 on Monterey on other machines. I also use AU format for Logic.

I've actually now started experiencing the same issue now with Kontakt 6.3.2 over the past few days. Importing everything into a new logic project fixes it every time though.

I'll have a look through the changelogs.

Edit: I haven't used/upgraded to 7 yet.
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Are you sure you're not seeing cached memory being delegated by macos?
 
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