[Paraview] Crash on Paraview

[Moreland, Kenneth]

(I'm cc'ing back to the ParaView mailing list so others can see and comment.)

OK.  I'm able to replicate the problem by creating a large data set with the Wavelet source.  What I suspect is happening is that ParaView is generating a wireframe representation of the selected cells.  The wireframe is taking up a lot of memory (quite possibly more than the original data).  ParaView should try to avoid this, so I have submitted a bug:

  http://www.paraview.org/Bug/view.php?id=8827

However, even if this bug were fixed, I suspect you will still run into inevitable memory crashes.  There are a couple of issues.  First, any time a filter does a topology change, for example by removing some cells, the filter must create a new data object to represent the new topology.  Thus, you will need to have enough memory to hold the original and the modified data at the same time.  The second issue is that if you remove some arbitrary cells from a structured data, the resulting mesh must be represented with an unstructured data type.  Unstructured data needs to have explicit topology defined, which takes many times more memory than its structured counterpart.  Thus, the "reduced" mesh could easily take up more memory.

I recommend finding another way to look at a specific potion of your data.  One way is to use volume rendering and try to set the uninteresting cells to have a zero opacity.  Another way is to try to extract polygonal surfaces in the area you want to see.  The slice and contour filters are often good at this.  For more information on what filters you should and shouldn't use on large data, take a look at the section on "Avoiding Data Explosion" in the SC08 ParaView tutorial, which is posted on the ParaView Wiki.

  http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/SC08_ParaView_Tutorial

-Ken


On 3/31/09 12:48 PM, "Wu, Yue" <yuewu at anl.gov> wrote:

Ken,
     Thanks for your help. As I said, my data files are pretty big. One is 26MB and another one is 129MB. How do I send or upload the files?
     The steps to cause crashing is simply:
1. Install ParaView;
2. Launch ParaView;
3. File-> Open, to open the VTK file;
4. At left bottom portion, click 'Apply', and at the right side, a 3D object is shown. I can use the mouse to drag and rotate.
5. Go to Edit->Select Cells Through, then I will drag a square on the 3D object to select the portion I want to erase.
6. Crash happened with the incomplete error message.

Thanks,

Ryan


________________________________
From: Moreland, Kenneth [mailto:kmorel at sandia.gov]
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2009 1:34 PM
To: Wu, Yue; paraview at paraview.org
Subject: Re: [Paraview] Crash on Paraview

I don't think this is enough information to diagnose your problem.  Could you send a more detailed description on how to replicate the crash and any data necessary?

-Ken


On 3/31/09 12:29 PM, "Wu, Yue" <yuewu at anl.gov> wrote:

Hello,
   I am new to ParaView and want  some help.
   I am using  ParaView to edit VTK files I generated from another software. The VTK is  reconstructed from parallel CT images. What I need to do is to erase those  features (bones, lungs etc) I don't want.

   The problem is that ParaView  crashes when I select a portion of the 3D object before I can delete the  portion. The message window is always covered  by the microsoft 'send  error report' window and I can not get the message out. The Output Messages  from the ParaView are:

Qt has caught an exception thrown from an event  handler. Throwing
exceptions from an event handler is  not supported in Qt. You must
reim( the rest of the message is blocked by the new  popup window).

   I am  running ParaView on a WinXP 32-bit machine with 2GB memory. I tried version  2.6 and 3.21, both has the problem. My VTK files are between 26MB and  130MB.

Thanks,

Ryan Wu



   ****      Kenneth Moreland
    ***      Sandia National Laboratories
***********
*** *** ***  email: kmorel at sandia.gov
**  ***  **  phone: (505) 844-8919
    ***      web:   http://www.cs.unm.edu/~kmorel




   ****      Kenneth Moreland
    ***      Sandia National Laboratories
***********
*** *** ***  email: kmorel at sandia.gov
**  ***  **  phone: (505) 844-8919
    ***      web:   http://www.cs.unm.edu/~kmorel

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