RAM usage

All OAK devices have 512 MiB (4 Gbit) on-board RAM, which is used for firmware (about 15MB), assets (a few KB up to 100MB+, eg. NN models), and other resources, such as message pools where messages are stored.

If you enable info logging, you will see how RAM is used:

[info] Memory Usage - DDR: 41.23 / 358.82 MiB, CMX: 2.17 / 2.50 MiB,
LeonOS Heap: 20.70 / 78.63 MiB, LeonRT Heap: 3.51 / 23.84 MiB

As you can see, RAM is split between the two LEON (CPU) cores, CMX (used for image manipulation), and DDR (everything else). If DDR usage is close to the max (in this example, 358 MiB), you might get an error such as:

[error] Neural network executor '0' out of '2' error: OUT_OF_MEMORY

This means you should decrease RAM consumption, and we will take a look at a few ways on how to do this.

Decreasing RAM consumption

  • Large frames

    If we change the resolution from 1080P to 4K in the RGB video example, DDR usage will increase from 41 MiB to 161 MiB. That’s because 4K uses 4x more RAM compared to 1080P frame. An easy way to decrease RAM consumption is to use lower resolution / smaller frames.

  • VideoEncoder

    VideoEncoder nodes can consume a lot of RAM, especially at high resolutions. For example, RGB Encoding example consumes 259 MiB. If we change the resolution from 4K to 1080P, we decrease DDR consumption to only 65 MiB.

  • ImageManip

    Each ImageManip node will have it’s own (output) pool of 4 frames (by default), so having multiple ImageManips that are manipulating high resolution frames will consume a lot of DDR RAM. You can change the pool size with manip.setNumFramesPool(4). By default, each pool “spot” will consume 1 MiB, even if it’s a small 300x300 RGB frame (which is 270kB). Specifying the output frame size can therefore decrease the RAM as well, eg. for a 300x300 RGB frame, you can set manip.setMaxOutputFrameSize(270000).

  • XLinkIn

    Just like ImageManip, each XLinkIn node has it’s own message pool as well. By default, each XLinkIn will consume 40 MiB, as each pool “spot” has 5 MiB reserved, and there are 8 “spots” in the pool. If you are sending 300x300 RGB frames from the host to the device, you can set xin.setMaxDataSize(270000), and also limit number of messages per pool xin.setNumFrames(4). This will decrease DDR RAM consumption from 40 MiB to about 1 MiB.

    If you are just sending control/config from the host, you can set xin.setMaxDataSize(1), as CameraControl and ImageManipConfig don’t have any extra data (like NNData/ImgFrame/Buffer).

Got questions?

Head over to Discussion Forum for technical support or any other questions you might have.