Deep Sky Stacker "Out of Memory"

[Garbz]

Hi All.

I'm getting the dreaded "Out of Memory" error when stacking images in DSS. When I enable 2x drizzle I get the error at the very end of the stack when it tries to generate the autosave.tif file. When I stack the 36mpxl images from my camera I get the error as well except it appears to manage to finish saving the file before giving me the error.

Now before someone says "Turn off 2x drizzle" I want to ask why?

I have a new computer. 16GB of RAM. I took a careful look at my system during the stack today. Stacking 16mpxl images with 2x drizzle showed no spike in memory usage. It stayed at 800MB ONLY throughout the entire stack right to the point where it complained about memory. No issues with harddisk space and pagefile usage was non-existent at the time either. Also at no point did DSS approach the 32bit memory page limit of 3.2GB nor the 2GB artificial limit which shouldn't be present in Windows 7 anyway.

So rather than simply not using 2x drizzle or permanently shooting 16mpxl images, do any of you know what the issue is or how to work around it since it's clearly not a legitimate out of memory message?

[Nikolas]

unfortunately it is the drizzle. Same thing happened to me when I was experimenting and only turning off the drizzle did it work, What does the drizzle do anyway?

[MrB]

http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/technical.htm#Drizzle ;)

Only works if your guiding isn't perfect or you have deliberately selected 'drizzle' with your guider setup.

[mithrandir]

How much memory does DSS use with no image loaded? How much with a 36Mpx image. Subtract to estimate the memory for an image.

2x drizzle would require 4x the image memory and the 32 bit limit will probably get tripped.

You probably need a 64 bit version DSS. Is there one?

[Garbz]

Well it's hard to say. It seems to never use more than 800MB of RAM when doing anything and stacking with drizzle on seemed to take a lot longer during the stacking step with out exceeding 800MB of RAM, but maybe the step writing out to the file does something weird.

Anyway it's a shame I did a search, no 64bit version available. So that means I'm on the very edge when it comes to using my D800, and drizzle is out of the question.

[alocky]

Hi Garbz - I was in exactly the same boat. I now use pixinsight - it does a much better job of stacking anyway. I don't think DSS in its current form can deal with the D800 files. Drizzling by a factor of 2 will make your images 4 times larger.
Cheers,
Andrew.

[Garbz]

Yep I'm aware at what Drizzle does and more importantly what benefits it brings when you Drizzle and then downsize back to the original size. It's a shame that I have a major abundance of processing power and the software isn't up to the task though.

Also I have yet to get Batch-Preprocessing to work.

[alocky]

I did get it to work in batches of 4 subs at a time, by running the file-list without loading everything up first. Also, even a failed run will produce a set of flats, darks and offset tiffs you can use to limit how many NEF files it loads next time. Also when it does run out of memory I found you need to close the app before trying again.
Good luck!
Andrew.

[Nikolas]

Many thanks :)

[2stroke]

Its more of a program error with it not being able to use pre allocated memory more then likely, lol its not a out of memory error in the term that your system doesn't have enough. You should check the fourms an dhunt around for others that have had the same issue on google.

[killswitch]

Im having a similar issue with my D800 and DSS. I keep getting an Out of Memory error and im only stacking like 15 frames, no drizzle.

My machine is an i7 with 8gb of RAM. I looked at the memory usage and the limitation seems to be with DSS.

Whats a good alternative stacking software thats free?