Increase the limit in the preferences. I have it set to 10 million.

On Sat, 13 Sept 2025 at 13:54, Jon Bondy via Discuss <
discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:

Thank you.

My main concern was that OpenSCAD became useless after this error.

Jon

On 9/13/2025 9:22 AM, nop head via Discuss wrote:

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Increasing the limit does seem to work, but the behavior here seems strange
and broken.  I confirmed that in both 2021.01 and a recent snapshot that it
fails with the warning about too many elements.  If you increase the limit
to 10 million then it succeeds and displays a message:

Normalized tree has 1020 elements!

which is a lot fewer than the 200k that triggered the problem. And like Jon
said, after you get that warning, OpenSCAD is useless. Clearing the cache
has no effect. Nothing will run, not even other simple files. So these
questions call out for answers::

1. Why do we get a warning about too many elements when there aren't very
   many elements?

2. Why does OpenSCAD go into a hung state after this warning?

On Sat, Sep 13, 2025 at 9:23 AM nop head via Discuss <
discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:

With it set to 10 million I never see the error. It does seem a bug if it
stops OpenSCAD working though.

On Sat, 13 Sept 2025, 15:00 Adrian Mariano via Discuss, <
discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:

On 9/13/25 11:14, nop head via Discuss wrote:

whereas I am running an earlier 2025.04.28.ai25192 from before all this
hullabaloo started. So as a small help, the following code renders for
both F5 with a dirty base and F6 is clean, I could print it if I so
desired but it would take quite a bite out of a $22 roll of petg. What
is it intended to be?

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.

• Louis D. Brandeis

On Sat, 2025-09-13 at 12:10 -0400, gene heskett via Discuss wrote:

That's weird.

I'm running OpenSCAD version 2025.08.19.ai26698.
When I slice it in Bambu Studio, ie tells me it will take 14.5g of
filament.

I tried a test on the 'h=' changes. If I set 10 million in preferences
and change h=1 to h=1000000 (yes, 1 million) then preview with the # in
that line, it shows the million on the x axis. That's an assumption, I
scrolled as far as I had patience for.

On 9/13/25 15:34, larry via Discuss wrote:

F6 render time was

Total rendering time: 0:00:00.122

So as posted, this code is good. No errors logged. So we have a valid
beginning point to do a bisect to nail down the failing commit. But my
box is not totally happy with bookworm so I'll defer to somebody with a
dead stable bookworm or trixie install.

No knowledge of the bamboo studio at all, I'm doing this basically to
put an it works anchor point earlier that the current month issue.. If I
were to print it, I'd feed it to prusaslicer 2.8.1 which still works on
my bookworm.  prusa has switched to flatpak and I've tried 2 or three
versions (2.9.0, 2.9.1, 2.9.2 since that locks up tight, requiring a
reboot to recover a functional machine.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.

• Louis D. Brandeis

Coincidentally, tonight I was working on a model with the default number of
elements and received the error:

WARNING: Normalized tree is growing past 200000 elements. Aborting
normalization.

Execution aborted

I, too, found that OpenSCAD was then dead and needed to be restarted.

It appears that a github issue has already been generated for thi: #3504

Len

On Sat, Sep 13, 2025 at 6:13 PM gene heskett via Discuss <
discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:

Interesting that others have replicated this while you cannot.  I
installed the latest build before posting to the list.

On 9/14/2025 12:28 AM, Jordan Brown wrote:

Jon, you don't say which OS you're running on.  I'm running on Linux and my
snapshot is 2025.8.17.  And as noted, with the default limit of 100k I get
the warning and hang in both that version and in 2021.01.  I noticed that
the number of elements changed, which seemed odd to me.  But also, if the
number of elements is around 1000, how is it over 200k?  I didn't
understand that.

On Sun, Sep 14, 2025 at 7:34 AM jon jonbondy.com via Discuss <
discuss@lists.openscad.org> wrote:

Windows 11

On 9/14/2025 9:16 AM, Adrian Mariano via Discuss wrote:

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Jon, do you get the error and hang in 2021.01 under Windows?

I deleted lines from Jon's example to obtain this minimal case:

$fn=8;
difference() {
union() {
cylinder(h = 1, d = 2);
cube(2);
}
for (z = [1:446]) cylinder(h = 11, d = 3);
}

If you change the number of overlapping cylinders to 445 there is no
error.  Original code had the cylinders translated so they didn't all
overlap.  You can add back a small translation based on z and the error
still occurs.

On Sat, Sep 13, 2025 at 11:14 AM nop head nop.head@gmail.com wrote:

Parsing design (AST generation)...

Saved backup file:
C:/Users/jon/OneDrive/Documents/OpenSCAD/backups/unsaved-backup-firnpdqo.scad

Compiling design (CSG Tree generation)...

Compiling design (CSG Products generation)...

Geometries in cache: 3

Geometry cache size in bytes: 3336

CGAL Polyhedrons in cache: 0

CGAL cache size in bytes: 0

Compiling design (CSG Products normalization)...

WARNING: Normalized tree is growing past 200000 elements. Aborting
normalization.

Execution aborted

On 9/14/2025 10:38 AM, Adrian Mariano via Discuss wrote:

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Seems weird that it's happening to you under Windows but not Jordan.  It
seems unlikely it depends on Windows version given that it's also happening
under Linux, which leaves differences in the settings as the explanation
for why Jordan doesn't reproduce it.

On Sun, Sep 14, 2025 at 11:01 AM Jon Bondy jon@jonbondy.com wrote:

Is there any easy way to dump all of my settings into a text file?

On 9/14/2025 11:31 AM, Adrian Mariano via Discuss wrote:

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It doesn't hang or crash for me, but with the h set to 10, iirc, the
pointed end is separated from the other part. Also, a bit of z fighting
for both h's.

On 14/09/2025 16:54, Jon Bondy via Discuss wrote:

On 9/14/2025 4:33 AM, jon jonbondy.com wrote:

Ah... it looks like I set the limit to 200K at some point in the dim
past, while the default is 100K.  The true limit is (for some unknown
reason) twice the parameter setting, so I saw the 200K in your error
message and it matched the 200K in my settings, so I thought we had the
same settings.

Indeed, for the h=1 case it fails if the parameter is set less than
about 65K, and for the h=10 case it fails if the parameter is less than
about 130K.

Sorry for the bad evidence.

On 9/14/2025 2:44 PM, Jordan Brown via Discuss wrote:

But I still don't see a hang, just the unexplained variation in the tree
size (507 vs 1008) and the unexplained failure (growing past 200K when
it only ever reaches ~1K).

On 9/14/2025 8:54 AM, Jon Bondy via Discuss wrote:

From a Windows command prompt:

reg query HKCU\Software\OpenSCAD\OpenSCAD /s

Or from regedit (the Registry Editor), navigate to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\OpenSCAD\OpenSCAD and then File/Export.

D:\Jon>reg query HKCU\Software\OpenSCAD\OpenSCAD /s

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\OpenSCAD\OpenSCAD
    recentFileList    REG_MULTI_SZ    D:/Jon/Spike Ring.scad\0
    lastOpenDirName    REG_SZ    D:/Jon

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\OpenSCAD\OpenSCAD\advanced
    enableHardwarnings    REG_SZ    true
    forceGoldfeather    REG_SZ    false
    enableSoundNotification    REG_SZ    true
    timeThresholdOnRenderCompleteSound    REG_SZ    30

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\OpenSCAD\OpenSCAD\design
    autoReload    REG_SZ    false

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\OpenSCAD\OpenSCAD\editor
    syntaxhighlight    REG_SZ    For Light Background
    indentStyle    REG_SZ    Tabs

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\OpenSCAD\OpenSCAD\feature
    manifold    REG_SZ    true

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\OpenSCAD\OpenSCAD\view
    hideEditor    REG_SZ    false
    hideConsole    REG_SZ    false
    hideErrorLog    REG_SZ    false
    hideCustomizer    REG_SZ    true
    hideAnimate    REG_SZ    true
    hideViewportControl    REG_SZ    true
    hideEditorToolbar    REG_SZ    false
    hide3DViewToolbar    REG_SZ    false
    showAxes    REG_SZ    true
    showScaleProportional    REG_SZ    true
    orthogonalProjection    REG_SZ    true
    showEdges    REG_SZ    false
    showCrosshairs    REG_SZ    true

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\OpenSCAD\OpenSCAD\window
    size    REG_SZ    @Size(2397 1336)
    position    REG_SZ    @Point(143 19)
    state    REG_BINARY
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
    geometry    REG_BINARY
400042007900740065004100720072006100790028000100D900D000CB0000000300000000000000000001001C000000000000002000000000000900BF00000000000400FC000000000001001D000000000000003F00000000000900BE00000000000400FB00000000000000000000000000000000000A0000000000000001001D000000000000003F00000000000900BE00000000000400FB002900

D:\Jon>

On 9/14/2025 5:56 PM, Jordan Brown wrote: