[Qgis-user] Hardware comparisons

[Paul Wittle]

Hi,

We were doing testing yesterday as I say and for our projects (which do have a lot of datasets) the starting level for QGIS is around 400MB. It is common for it to steadily increase up to around 2GB but I’ve seen people running algorithms or using tracing hit 4GB or more.

When I say ‘ram hungry’ what I mean is that I’m not seeing any evidence that QGIS clears the amount since going 64bit.

With MapInfo (64bit) we were able to get a reading around 1.8GB but withing a period of time it returns back to a low level; this is not the case for QGIS.

The issue is that if you have multiple instances running on the same server then you need the application to clear unused (or not recently used) memory or you risk performance issues as the day goes on.

Of course, I’m advocating that we use QGIS but the two applications do appear to operate quite differently and my ICT infrastructure colleagues wanted to know what to expect. I was just looking to see if there were any settings I can use to ramp up the garbage collection for QGIS or alternatively something I can point at that gives a comparison.

Not to worry if there isn’t but I thought I’d ask.
Thanks for your replies,
Paul

From: Nicolas Cadieux <njacadieux.gitlab at gmail.com>
Sent: 15 June 2021 19:23
To: Paul Wittle <paul.wittle at dorsetcouncil.gov.uk>
Subject: Re: [Qgis-user] Hardware comparisons

Hi,

I think you will have difficulty finding that.  It would be interesting to see.  I don’t think QGIS is particularity ram hungry. I have never seen à out of memory error starting QGIS on any computer including my intel core 2 that has 4GB of memory.

 If I open an empty project with no plugins I see 158.2MB for QGIS. With a bunch of plugins, it goes up to 500MB.  Same empty projet in ArcMap (ArcGIS Desktop 10.7.1) run at about 60MB. It looks like a big difference but it’s not.

The true problems with ram will occur when projects are open with lots of data.  That is when you will see some differences between how different software mange memory and disk cashing.

 Biggest differences will be found running algorithms.  For example, in processing,  an algorithms running with a SAGA tool will normally be much more memory hungry than the same algorithms from a QGIS tool.  That has all to do with the choices the programmer makes when writing his code.

Nicolas Cadieux
https://gitlab.com/njacadieux


Le 15 juin 2021 à 11:45, Paul Wittle <paul.wittle at dorsetcouncil.gov.uk<mailto:paul.wittle at dorsetcouncil.gov.uk>> a écrit :

Hi,

We were doing some testing for using GIS applications as RemoteApp solutions today and I noticed that QGIS seems to be pretty RAM hungry compared with say MapInfo. Does anyone know if there are any good summaries available showing the differences in RAM/CPU use comparing all the big ones (i.e. QGIS, MapInfo, ArcMap etc)?

Also, is it possible to set a limit on the total RAM QGIS can use in the settings? Is it the cache size?

Thanks in advance,
Paul
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