Overall speed of asset loading
germanianer
Posts: 4
Hey everyone.
I love Daz but what drives me crazy is the speed (asset loading and work)
At the beginning i loaded everything from a network storage but this was unusable.
Currently im using daz on a 32gb ram DDR4 PC with Ryzen 7 of the 5th gen with Auros SSD with 5gb read write speed. And when i open the default Genesis 8 Character into the vieport, without any iray view, only the default vieport.
When i click on the Genesis 8 character, the loading window appears and show:
Reading asset
clearing the scene
deleteing objects
for 5 minutes until the Genesis Figure is loaded into the scene.
While the loading screen appears until it shows the figure in the viewport, there is no load on my hardware at all: CPU, HDD, Graphics under 5% load, Ram arround 4GB.
Why is daz loading so long when there is no load?
But it is not only the loading speed, everything in daz is slow, when i use blender and open characters or scenes with more then 20gb its loading for 5 minutes, but daz need sometimes 20minutes for scenes with less then 100mb and sometimes the viewport is slow. And im using daz on 3 PCs with nearly the same performance.
When i pose characters its laggy.
When i export the same character into blender and work there, than there is no compare between both, because blender is rediciolously faster then daz.
Is there any trick? or something in the settings wrong? Or do i have to live with it because daz is free and it is like it is, is there any special hardware necessary?
And i'm not talking about any type of rendering, not in viewport not in image nowhere, only viewport work with smooth shaded.
Version: 4.15.030
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Comments
The two main reasons for your character to load slowly are;
1. The characters and/or morphs you have installed are having problems with other characters and/or morphs you have installed to the base figure you are loading.
2. The amount of characters and/or morphs you have loaded for the base figure is just too much.
Usually solving the problems (no 1) is enough to get the loading times back to reasonable level.
It takes so long because you have way too many morphs or duplicates of morphs. Removing duplicates or unsued morphs is only solution.
try scene witchout characters and you will see how fast it loads ;)
As for posing lag it should work like charm in any mode other then iray preview. Try using vieport in texture mode, if it still lags there is something wrong with your setup.
Also Blender is pretty much tripla A modeling software while Daz is free posing software, obviously it will never compare in performence but it shines in ease of use.
Yes, mine was slow due to morph experiments I was conducting (goofing around mainly while making notes about the results and usefulness).
A great graphics card should solve the problem - Price of e.g. RTX 3090 graphics cards is tripple and a ripoff right now, therefore, I refuse to buy one at the current prices.
So instead I created a RAM drive, installed DAZ to it, while the content (connect and other libraries) are separate on a RAID-0 large volume... Then I linked DAZ to the content.
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Note: NVMe drives are very fast too, or [if] you have a GPU, you can also make a super fast GPU RAM drive.
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Is there a tool to see a list of all morphs used in a scene (so that we can fix the problem, rather than treat the symptom) slowing things down???
Speed of the storage media has very little to do with the loading times, as does the GPU, single thread speed of the processor has some effect.
There is no point in having a list of morphs in the scene, as the scene has dials for all the morphs one has installed for the characters used in the scene, irrespective of whether they are used or not.
I'm sorry to disagree. I have an SSD and an HHD. I had Daz on the SSD first everything load licky split. I have since moving Daz to the HHD load time have more than double. A 7200 RPM HDD will deliver a read/write speed of 80-160MB/s. On the other hand, a typical SSD will deliver a read/write speed of between 200 MB/s to 550 MB/s. My SSD gets a read/write speed of up to 3,470 MB I have a WD_BLACK 1TB SN750 NVMe connect straight to the PCIe bus. Building a ram drive was a smart idea for the other fella.
Depends on which loading times are we talking about - The one related to loading a base character or loading a scene that's full of stuff.
The loading times of the base character are usually what's being complained about and that is not effected by the speed of the storage media, as it has nothing to do with the speed the media can read files.
And again based on the actual application base on my system. When loading a full scene, say "Beneath Fire Mountain" Full atmosphere, loading time on my machine, since I move Daz to HHD Have tripled. While Loading full 8.1 HD figure with all morphs have at least double.
If you don't use any tricks in loading characters, the dials for all the installed morphs are always loaded and the relations between them made at loading time - This together with possible conflicts between different morphs/characters are the main reasons for increased loading times. Have you installed any new characters or morphpacks for G8 or G8.1 after you moved your content to HD?
I did extensive testing on G8 load times and posted the findings here: https://www.deviantart.com/jasongalterio/journal/DS-Duplicate-Formulas-Update-878516851
To summarize the two biggest impacts are:
Duplicate formulas loading.
The number of morph dials loading.
Hardrive read speed has a minimal impact because most of the bottleneck is processing the morph dials into memory. The loading errors cause a dysfunction and momentary pause in morph processing which causes a significant impact.
Sure, older computers with older hardware will take longer. But the same computer with the same number of morphs installed will not show a major delta between using a SSD vs HD.
This ONLY applies to the loading of G8 figures. Not scenes without G8 figures.
No
Which type of SSD are you or were you using at the time of the test?
Compared with SATA SSDs, the NVMe SSDs have faster data speed. Since the NVMe SSDs plug right into the PCIe bus reducing bottlenecks. PCI Express works more as a network than as a bus, devices no longer share bandwidth as they do on a conventional bus.
@Jason Galterio So I read that article you wrote. I have never ever seen that error.
Consider yourself lucky then. One pair of conflicting products can result in a load delay of a few seconds or a few minutes. It depends on how many dials gave duplicate asset ids.
If you have multiple conflicting pairs then load times can skyrocket.
Or you don't have that many characters / morphs yet
I could be lucky and I might not have a lot of Morphs
No offense but that is a negligible number of morphs. I'm not surprised that you see no delays in loading. I would also not be surprised if just the overhead in DS loads faster between a SSD and HD.
I have 750 G8F Characters / Morph products. When all of them are installed G8F takes about 12 minutes to load on my system. And thats using a SSD.
With two 970 EVO Plus NVMe(s) and an 18 core/4.8GHz proc, I feel your pain! Getting no love from DAZ's inner workings stings a bit. That said, I imagine future versions will be better at handling this and you should definitely make some scene adjustments as that is a part of your issue!
Bringing things back around to your original question, you may not like my answer.
Uninstall all Characters / Morphs that you don't need. That should resolve both your G8 loading times and the laggy responsiveness of the dials.
Personally I have only the following items permenantly installed:
Base G8F and G8M
Growing Up
All the Core 8 Figures
Everything else I install as I need it and uninstall when I don't need it. If I make custom dialed character, I use Content Gatherer ( https://www.daz3d.com/content-gatherer ) to archive the character. (This will copy the morphs used and allows me to reinstall just the ones I need and not the whole package.)
I keep the Core characters installed because of all the other characters that have dependancies. So this stops me having to hunt down a bunch of additional products.
Ok, I don't have a lot of morphs. So I did some tests. First I would like to point out my first run on the SSD surprised me beyond belief. It took 45+ seconds to load (I know before you say anything, what is there to complain about 45+ seconds). That can't be right. So I did it again. 43+ seconds. I'm like what the hell. I looked at the log and there were all these warnings and errors about BitLocker locked the SSD, but the product still loaded. So I turned off Bitlocker and decrypted the drive and got the following results.
HHD:
2021-10-11 11:44:09.240 Finished Loading Character Addons
2021-10-11 11:44:09.275 Finished asset load (open): 0m 14.495s - /People/Genesis 8 Female/Characters/Victoria 8 HD.duf
SSD.:
2021-10-11 16:55:11.138 Finished Loading Character Addons
2021-10-11 16:55:11.171 Finished asset load (open): 0m 10.372s - /People/Genesis 8 Female/Characters/Victoria 8 HD.duf
How in the hell did Bitlocker slow the load down on the SSD? So if you have BitLocker on you might want to test with it off not just unlocked.
There Is still a difference in the speed of SSD vs HHD. Not as much as I thought though. Still like to point out I did notice the delay. Like Lieutenant Commander Data: said "0.68 seconds sir. For an android, that is nearly an eternity."
Then I bought some of Zevo's Morphs to do another set of tests.
SSD:
2021-10-11 17:15:00.123 Finished Loading Character Addons
2021-10-11 17:15:00.169 Finished asset load (open): 0m 13.974s - /People/Genesis 8 Female/Characters/Victoria 8 HD.duf
HHD:
2021-10-11 23:31:40.269 Finished Loading Character Addons
2021-10-11 23:31:40.321 Finished asset load (open): 0m 14.506s - /People/Genesis 8 Female/Characters/Victoria 8 HD.duf
So research shows me that you are right about a little difference in loading, but still a difference. Now I have to turn BitLocker to see if my HDD takes an impact like my SSD
Edit: Each Set of tests was a fresh install of Daz
Edit: Sometimes I have old-timers mind farts. Of course, encrypting a drive slows down performance.
There are a few "issues" that combine to cause the long load times.
First one is the fact Studio is single threaded, that basically means it's only using one core in your CPU for everything.
Second is the enormous amount of ERC links DS has to create, a simple character that only comes with a head and body morph can have over 1500 of them in two DSF files, more complex characters have a lot more DSF files with a lot more ERC links.
Third is the amount of utter garbage people are sticking in the "Morphs" folder.
The ERC links and being single threaded is the biggest part of the issue, each time DS fails to create a link it pauses, now under a light load each pause is a fraction of a second, so most wont notice anything. But under a heavy load of a hundred or more characters/morph packs, then each pause can take a bit longer to resolve, add in all of the other issues from poorly done content and load times start to stretch out.
Yes, I see that now. Sometimes I'm just hard-headed and have to prove to myself, just how dense I am. Did learn new stuff so it's not wasted.
That was why I wanted to share the research I did. I have been in the place you are and found it frustrating.
Admittedly my research was mostly to prove how bad the Duplicate Formula errors were. The errors were being written off as inconsequential at the time I wrote my articles. The load times were something that was a sideline research in the overall process.
What caught me by surprise was that the video card had an impact on the G8 load times. This still makes zero sense to me.
Daz Studio is not single-threaded - some processes are. Some processes do not lend themselves to multi-threading.
@All thx for the nice explanations and tips.
@piotrstezycki you arre completely right, the morphs are loaded when you add a character and until all morphs are loaded daz is not responding.
The morphs are on an external drive and this was to slow, that was the reason why the assets are loading so slow (asset is fast but the morphs are reading slow).
But there was a second problem: Daz keeps freezing in interval times, or when i clicked on any item in daz, doesn't matter if asset or library or render or what ever, i gone crazy for hours.
The reason was, i have a custom daz directory in my library, but the hdd which is assigned to this directory in windows doesn't exists anymore, and Daz tryes in interval times to read this directory, and until the timeout is reached, daz is not responding. I deleted the dead directory and now its constantly running, no freezes in viewport or anywhere else.
I moved the morph directory to the nvme and now its running like a charm.
Thank you so much guys for the great input, and DAZ for this awesome software.