A question about shutting down Daz Studio
nabob21
Posts: 1,022
Hello,
I have noticed that if I have been using Daz Studio and then shut down the program, it can often take 10-15 minutes before I can start the program up again. I have looked at the Task Manager after I have shut Daz Studio down and it looks like the CPU and memory usage by Daz Studio continues to be maintained, and may even increase for several minutes after the shutdown before the program finally completely closes. Why does this happen? And can anything be done about it so that the program closes quicker?
Thanks in advance for any help with this.
nabob21
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Comments
I can't tell you why (great song by The Eagles), but I ALWAYS close Daz Studio using Task Manager. Otherwise, I may have to restart the computer to get it to open. I've been doing it this way for almost 2 years, and I haven't seen any adverse effects.
From discussions in other threads I think the cause is due to the number of morphs loaded - particularly a problem with G8 rather than previous generations. I like to fashion my own characters from the various morph packs available and it seems that DAZ Studio insists on loading every single morph in your library for that figure (G8F or G8M). Having said that, every character that you buy has its own morphs and I buy very few characters so my wait time is possibly less than those with a large collection in the library.
I thought I had seen a suggestion that this has been "fixed" in 4.20 but, sad to say, it hasn't. In fact I swear it is taking even longer.
That does make some sense marble. I can see it taking a while to shut things down but why would it use more resources (sometimes quite a bit more) to shut down? As I mentioned above, it takes 10-15 minutes (or longer) to shut down completely and for most of that time resource usage is increasing.
The log file shows what it is doing during that time but none of that information means anything to me. FWIW, if I have three G8 figures in a scene I usually wait about 4 or 5 minutes.
Having duplicate morphs, can hang closing DS for ever.
I was wondering, why the lashes didn't remember their dial settings. Every other time I opened a scene, they had reverted to default.
Started searching and found out that some creators had included the morph for the lashes in their product, saving the lash morphs in their own character folders.
While searching for the lash morphs, found also G8 base morphs duplicated the same way in other characters.
Deleted the duplicates I found and haven't had DS hang on closing since. Previously I had to close DS with the Taskmanager at least half of the time.
Finding those duplicates is not about files with the same file name, but finding files that are the same.
This is crazy to read. I never have any issues closing DS (I just click the X in the upper right hand corner) and it never remains in the taskbar either. The closest thing to an issue I have is I can't reopen it after closing unless I wait for 20 seconds, probably because it is still closing down
Are you sure it isn't in Task Manager? If you sort by the CPU column? If I do that it is at the top of the list and remains so for minutes until it slowly starts to drop the CPU percentage.
My hypothesis is Daz Studio is calling destructors to clean up memory, pointlessly, instead of saving the UI and exiting the process. There is no reason to be freeing memory at that point, since all of the memory is freed on process exit anyway by the OS.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/6333581/#Comment_6333581
Until about three weeks ago or so, I had the problem of DS taking 2 - 3 minutes to close out of Task Manager and be available to launch again. I mostly play around with simple scenes with perhaps one figure. About three weeks ago, I noticed that DS was closing out in just several seconds. I just loaded three base Genesis 8 figures and closed DS and it was gone from Task Manager in just a few seconds.
If I need to restart DS for whatever reason, I save my work and start a second instance while the first does whatever it feels it needs to.
That could certainly be part of it Marble, I don't know.
It also appears to be cleaning up RAM, I've seen this too with complicated scenes and lots of figures. I watch Task Manager, and see that the RAM used by the Studio process is slowly using less and less RAM until it eventually closes down.
Sevrin, how do you start the second instance? I can't get it to open again until it closes completely in the task manager.
I don't know if this will help for this situation, but it does make a big difference for me when I want/need to restart DS because Iray dropped to CPU so I need to clear GPU. memory. I save the scene, then start a new blank (empty) scene. After the empty/start scene is loaded I close DS. When I do this DS will fully shut down now in just a few seconds instead of 30 seconds to a couple of minutes. Hopefully this might solve your issues as well.
On my desktop PC DAZ shuts down it about 30 seconds. On my laptop DAZ has to be shut down via the task manager or a restart.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/6467671/#Comment_6467671
I did that for a while too but I somehow got the impression (maybe I read it here) that opening a new scene does not clear the RAM or, more importantly, the VRAM. So I reverted to doing it the long way. I just wish DAZ would sort it out because I render hundreds of scenes during a project and the amount of time wasted waiting those few minutes every time I close DAZ Studio is time I will never get back.
Is this different from staying in task manager permanently? That was happening to my install until the (free) Octane plugin was removed.
Loading an empty scene before shutting down DS helped a lot when I had a mess of duplicate morphs in my content libraries.
I cleaned my content and now DS closes quickly and I only have to wait 20-30s before to reopen DS
Another thing to try is after saving your Scene, select everything in the Scene Tab (Including Environment and Tone Mapping Nodes) and hit Delete, then Close Daz.
I started doing this a while back and it seems like Daz clears from the Task Manager much faster this way as well.
@prixat's post about Octane jogged my memory that it was three weeks ago that I purchased and installed Accelerator for UltraScenery and had problems with it crashing and freezing Das Studio. After several posts and replies in another forum, the solution was to uninstall Octane and untick it as an installed plugin in Daz Studio. That instantly cleared my problem with using Accelerator for UltraScenery but also coincides with Daz Studio no longer taking several minutes to clear from memory/Task Manager.
As soon as I decided that Octane was not for me, I uninstalled it and removed the plugin check-box tick. I still get slow shutdowns though so I might have a look at trying to find all those duplicate morph files. I know there are Windows find utilities that can discover duplicates by a varietry of comparison criteria.
I created a little script, that at least improves the closing speed.
The Studio cleanup process that lingers invisibly can be sped up considerably by first doing the cleanup yourself, as much as you can. I recommend pressing New Scene and letting it do garbage collection before you exit Studio. I always do. See my comments in the other thread:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/8475371/#Comment_8475371
There are still going to be some things that absolutely make its garbage collection go nuts. Yesterday I was wrestling with a scene that I could OPEN quickly and not CLOSE ... the first time I tried to clean it out with New Scene, it took SO long that I gave up (this was in the middle of the night and I wanted to go to bed and I just shut down the computer and said **** it, I'll check if it left a mess tomorrow). The second time, I did wait it out; it eventually did clean up but it took OVER FORTY MINUTES. The problem was figure instances; Studio does very, very weird memory allocation with instances of figures. (Try this fun experiment: Make one instance copy of a figure and then see how long it takes to delete the original figure. Now make ten instance copies of the figure and see how long it takes to delete the original. This will happen even if you delete all the instances first.) I had something like fifty instances of a particular figure (crowd scene! and couldn't use billboards) and that, combined with the large memory footprint of the scene, is what did it.