Maximum Number of Subframes with WBPP

Hello Jerry.

Difficult number to pin down as to how many exactly will impact speed.
More ram will certainly help. Pixinsight recommend 64Gb minimum but I've run WBPP with an 8gb laptop and a 32Gb memory PC. 
I would suggest if you can, go to 32GB or if your board can take it 2x 48GB dimms. You can populate all 4 Dimm slots but you won't get maximum speed if you do. They will run at 3200MHz or there abouts which is fine. Go with as much memory as you can afford and fit on your computer.

I've just done a 401 lights run of LRGB HSO at 32mb each and took around 45 minutes at 2x drizzle.
The Drizzle part at 2x is about 50% slower than 1x Drizzle so makes no real difference to overall time.
I'm now running a I9 285 and 192Gb memory.

On my old machine with an 18 core Xeon at 2.3GHz and 32Gb memory the same stack took just under  3 hours. Which I though was pretty good going.
The longest run was 32 hours with 240 lights @199mb each hence the new build. While it didn't collapse the computer it came pretty close.

Also how you setup WBPP helps..

Linear defects correction can be left out if you know your camera chip hasn't got lots of column and or row  defects. That will reduce your time. Use Fast integration. Change the presets from Maximum quality to Faster with good quality or even the fastest with lower quality.

I'm sorry this isn't a definitive answer as there isn't one really. Hopefully the community can give you more of a definitive help than I have.

Peter

Jerry Gerber:
I’m using an APS-C sensor (ASI2600MM), each subframe is little less than 50MB.

How many subframes can I pre-process in WBPP before starting to see it slow to a crawl or even fail?

I’m running Pixinsight on a fast i7 CPU, fast SSD drives but with only 16GB of RAM. Would adding more RAM change this capacity?

Thanks,

Jerry

Yes, adding memory will increase the number of subframes you will be able to process. IF all of your RAM were available for holding images that would equate to about ~300 images. But obviously Pixinsight/windows and other apps eat into available RAM. I use 96GB  of RAM and have processed north of 500 images no problem. But you also need to assign a good size page file on a fast drive. Advice: add as much RAM as you can afford / your system allows.

Oskari Nikkinen:
I tried stacking ~1500 subs with WBPP once but could not get it to make any real progress overnight. 16GB ram, SSD, i7-6700k and also an IMX571 camera so same sized files as yours. So whatever the max reasonable number of subs ends up at, its lower than 1500.

Did you use a page file? I would suggest setting a 100-200GB page file on a fast drive. But 16GB of RAM is just not remotely enough.