nHair cache memory leak?

#1

Hi
I need some advice, is it generally recommended not to use a very high number of follicles+curves for nHair? (> 5000 follicles, 20 segments)
I’m getting great looking results with self collision when the head is not moving. I would never get that look when using a lower curve count. Simulation time with that is ok too, like 2 minutes per frame.

      But when going from a non moving head to an animated head the situation changes drastically: There seems to be a memory leak when building the cache and performance goes down every frame to a point it's unusable (10-20 minutes per frame and it seems to be going up with every frame) 
      
    So it is generally recommended to only use a low curve number for animation? Are there any other performance tips (I already have static cling off, twist tracking off, follicle animation off).

I’m stuck, I really want to do high res nHair simulation but it doesn’t really seem to work.
Thank you for any tips!

     (Post title doesn't really fit the subject anymore after editing, but I can't rename it....)
#2

ok right now I have a different problem… I took follicle count down to 3000, segment count down to 10 but now maya eats up all available RAM immediately when starting the nHair simulation… even when rebuilding the scene from scratch

100% stumped… any ideas what could cause this now? I believe I should just give up the idea of simulating that many follicles.

#3

Ok in case someone is interested: the issue was that I used humanIK on the body - which doesn’t appear to go well together with nHair, after baking humanIK the simulation time was very fast (15 seconds for 6000 hairs, 20 segments)… Dammit this one did cost me some nerves