Taylor Petrick

From your testing, does it seem like the reloading is happening because TOPs is invalidating the parameter too often, or due to an issues in the COP itself? E.g. if you just use a constant string value instead vs an expression.

I can see about setting up something similar on my end to repro if it seems like a TOPS/PDG expr issue. It's possible that it's flagging the expression and therefore parm/node as dirty too often, causing the reload.

Services record their memory usage each time a job finishes as part of the response sent back to Houdini. We don't use a finer granularity than that as it would require more active polling of the process while a job is in flight.

It's possible to set up automatic resetting or restarting of clients when that measured memory usage grows too large after a job finishes. "Reset" in means a special message is sent to the worker asking it to unload assets/its scene, and "Restart" is a full tear-down/restart of the worker process.

The settings for that are available in the service panel or on the Service Create node, if you're using the node-based workflow for managing your services. I think that'll give you what you need in this case.

TOPs doesn't unlock HDAs in the general case.

Does your HDA contain ROP Fetch nodes that cook in process and also point to a ROP in the HDA itself, for example a ROP Geometry? The ROP Fetch will unlock the HDA that contains the ROP being cooked, because it often needs to set parameters on that ROP. You can disable that behavior using the "Unlock Target ROP Node" as described in the documentation: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/top/ropfetch.html#unlocktargetrop [www.sidefx.com]