Dear Marton Ady,
I am currently facing a problem with Molflow when trying to save a model with more than 400 000 facets. I can read in the stl file with this number of facets and see the geometry in Molflow, but when I try to save this file as geo or geo7z file in order to start calculation, the code crashes. Could you recommend any solution for this or a trick to go around ?
Many thanks in advance and Best regards,
Donald HOUNGBO
Molflow isd’t suitable for geometries over 100.000 facets, and usually it is recommended to simplify the geometry to avoid working wiht these huge files. Usually most geometries can be reduced to vacuum-wise important components, resulting in less than 10.000 facets.
Nevertheless, I can find out the reason for the crash. If you can share the STL file with me (a link or email), I can see and debug it. Get back to me if you’d like to.
Marton
Dear Marton,
I would of course like to send you couple stl files with this issue but I can’t find how to attach a file to my comments on the forum. If this option is not available on the forum, please let me know on which mail address I can send them.
Donald
Indeed, it is not possible to upload to this forum.
Please send it to me to marton dot ady at cern dot ch
Please note that the unit for the files is milimeter.
Dear Marton,
Because the example files were too heavy, I could not send them by mail. I therefore sent you a link where youwill find a folder with two STL files, each issueing a different error message. I also added a print screen of each error message.
One first issue is that, with files like the STL file named : “31by31_matrix_33facets_roughest_200mm_radius_sphere.stl”, molflow can not open them, crashes and the corresponding error is in the image file named : “Error_molflow.exe has stopped working.png”.
A second type of error is encountered with second STL file named :“26by26_matrix_33facets_roughest_200mm_radius_sphere.stl”. I could open this STL file but when I try to save it as geo7z (prior to collapsing operations), I receive the error in the image file named : “Error_Failed to create loader dataport.png”.
Hope this information can help you in understanding what Imean.
Donald HOUNGBO
The first file has 840K facets, the second has 1.4M facets.
In both cases, you get error messages because you run out of memory: the second file would require 3GB of ram to load, then an addition 2GB per worker process, not speaking about graphics memory.
The second file is even more extreme, you would need about 16GB of RAM but then again, the OpenGL rendering would make the user interface extremely laggy. For your info, Molflow, as a 32bit application can allocate only 4GB of ram.
In you case, I’m not sure what you try to achieve with the huge array, but I believe setting up preiodic boundary conditions would solve your problem (see documentation about it). I’ve put an periodic file, which only contains 60 facets, to the Dropbox folder. I’ve also added a memory check to Molflow: in the new version, instead of crashing, it will display an error message. “Cannot create dataport loader” is also an error coming from the fact that you’re out of memory to create the subprocesses.