FME Memory management

It may be worth checking how FME is calculating ‘virtual memory’ here, as it may not correspond directly to the value shown by Windows. The 255.98 GB could represent available virtual address space rather than the amount the system can actually commit.

I’d suggest that you confirm this with FME support before assuming the figure is used for memory optimisation.

​@sharon_43 Thanks. I was wondering if one of the safe support would be on here :) 

One additional observation suggests that FME isn't just reporting 255.98 GB of virtual memory available and using that value to derive its memory management thresholds:

• Start freeing memory when process exceeds 191.98 GB
• Stop freeing memory when process falls below 143.99 GB

As the same AVD host reports approximately 64 GB RAM and 73.5 GB virtual memory in Windows System Information, FME could be overestimating available memory in a multi-session environment and delaying memory optimisation during large jobs.

Hi ​@andrewj74! Thanks for opening a support case and for sharing those memory-threshold details. We’ll update this thread as soon as we have more information.

Thank you for raising this! 🙂
 

Hey ​@andrewj74. We appreciate your patience. For anyone who has a similar use case, it is currently on our radar and we’ll update you as soon as we have more information. Thanks.

Just an update based on the test:  FME is not actually using the reported 255.98 GB available virtual memory or 191.98 GB memory-release threshold in the way initially assumed. In practice, FME began reporting “Resource Manager: Optimizing Memory Usage” when the process reached around 55–60 GB committed memory, which is consistent with the actual 73.5 GB total virtual memory available on the AVD.

I guess the question is just why FME reports the much higher virtual-memory values, where those values come from and what those figures actually represent. Thanks for looking into this.