[Paraview] XDMF/HDF5 reader memory usage

[Tobias Brandvik]

After doing some more digging, it appears this problem is not only
related to temporal collections, but all XDMF/HDF5 files with spatial
collections. If repeatedly open and close a file containing a spatial
collection, Paraview's memory usage gradually increases until it hangs
my machine. I observe this in both 3.6 and 3.8 RC2.

Cheers,
Tobias

---
Tobias Brandvik
PhD Student
Whittle Laboratory, University of Cambridge
1 JJ Thomson Avenue
Cambridge CB3 0DY, UK


On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 12:06 PM, Tobias Brandvik <tbrandvik at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm experiencing some strange behaviour with the XDMF reader when
> trying to create an animation of the data contained in a set of HDF5
> files. My approach is as follows:
>
> 1. One XDMF file which is a temporal collection containing links to a
> list of other XDMF files
> 2. One XDMF file for each time step (linked to by the XDMF file
> above), each of which is a spatial collection of several 2D structured
> grids. The data for the grids is contained in HDF5 files (also one for
> each time step).
>
> When I open the file with the temporal collection in Paraview, the
> data shows up as a temporal collection as expected. I can step back
> and forth in time and everything seems to work just fine. However, as
> I load in more time steps (by stepping forward in time), Paraview's
> memory usage keeps increasing. It seems like it is not freeing the
> memory associated with the old time step when reading in a new one.
>
> To illustrate this problem, I've uploaded a collection of XDMF and
> HDF5 files to the following location:
>
> http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tb302/xdmf_example.tar.gz
>
> There are 10 time steps in the collection. The data set is very small,
> but it should still show the problem (I could easily generate larger
> data sets if necessary). I get the same behaviour in Paraview 3.6 and
> 3.8 on both Centos 5.3 (64 bit) and Mac OS X 10.5.
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Best wishes,
> Tobias
>
> ---
> Tobias Brandvik
> PhD Student
> Whittle Laboratory, University of Cambridge
> 1 JJ Thomson Avenue
> Cambridge CB3 0DY, UK
>