This is the biggest problem I have at the moment with Panda on MacOS (which otherwise works very well and is fantastically efficient even on old hardware):
The garbage collection never seems to set in, leading to a constant increase in memory consumption.
Even a simple program that does nothing shows this:
from direct.showbase.ShowBase import ShowBase
from panda3d import core
core.loadPrcFileData('', 'sync-video false')
core.loadPrcFileData('', 'show-frame-rate-meter true')
class MyApp(ShowBase):
def __init__(self):
ShowBase.__init__(self)
app = MyApp()
app.run()
In under an hour, the real memory usage reached more than 3 GB on a M1 Mac under MacOS 14.6 (see sceenshot).
The unlimited framerate is only so that the problem shows itself faster, but the increasing memory usage is there with ‘sync-video true’, too.
I use Python 3.12.6 (installed via MacPorts) and Panda3D 1.10.14.
I also tried and the same problem appears with:
Panda3D 1.10.14 and Python 3.8 (the earliest version that runs on this computer)
Panda3D 1.11.0.dev3323 and Python 3.12
It also seems to affect MacOS 10.13 (on Intel-Mac, there, the memory consumption sometimes goes down but in the long run it rises constantly), but it doesn’t affect the same Intel-Mac under MacOS 10.9 (there, a small game of mine hovers at 95 MB for hours).
Is there something I am missing that could be done about?
So, I was a bit puzzled by this, since it’s not reported by PStats or the leaks utility, but after some investigation I discovered that it’s Apple’s new Metal-based OpenGL driver that is leaking. It seems to be using autorelease a lot and that means that OpenGL calls need to be within an Objective-C @autorelease block. This is not documented anywhere and I can’t find anyone else who has run into this, but putting an autorelease block around the whole frame seems to make the leak go away.
But there was another problem: the installation package that I tried first doesn’t work:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Library/Developer/Panda3D/samples/ball-in-maze/main.py", line 12, in <module>
from direct.showbase.ShowBase import ShowBase
File "/Library/Developer/Panda3D/direct/showbase/ShowBase.py", line 42, in <module>
from panda3d.core import *
ImportError: dlopen(/Library/Developer/Panda3D/panda3d/core.cpython-38-darwin.so, 0x0002): tried: '/Library/Developer/Panda3D/panda3d/core.cpython-38-darwin.so' (mach-o file, but is an incompatible architecture (have 'x86_64', need 'arm64e' or 'arm64')), '/System/Volumes/Preboot/Cryptexes/OS/Library/Developer/Panda3D/panda3d/core.cpython-38-darwin.so' (no such file), '/Library/Developer/Panda3D/panda3d/core.cpython-38-darwin.so' (mach-o file, but is an incompatible architecture (have 'x86_64', need 'arm64e' or 'arm64'))
“python -m pip install panda3d-1.10.15.dev45-cp38-cp38-macosx_11_0_universal2.whl” did. I had actually encountered the same problem with the current installer package (for 1.10.14).
