TG 4.1.11 - short frequent hangs with TG... CPU threading problems?

Started by pokoy, August 18, 2017, 06:20:04 AM

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pokoy

I am seeing something I didn't get with any other version until now. Some actions, like resetting TG (file menu > New) or loading and saving scene files takes 30 seconds, sometimes even longer. During that time TG is unresponsive or draws a blank white window... It's not happening always, but quite often. For example, saving a file (network or locally, doesn't matter) will sometimes happen immediately, other times it takes somewhere between 30-60 seconds. Sometimes, changing values in a node will behave similar and causes TG to get unresponsive for some time. All this is without RTP being used.

When rendering, I sometimes can't access other programs and the mouse pointer disappears or freezes, browsing the internet (Opera, Chrome based) is also heavily affected, the browser hangs or takes really long to load even a simple page.

I suspect that the updated threading and CPU utilization isn't as smooth as it should be. I've seen similar behavior from renderers in WIP stage where CPU threading hasn't been optimized. I never had these problems before and could perfectly render in the background and still do something else on the same PC.

Anyone else seeing this?

jaf

I have noticed a difference in how TG4 looks when loading (file|new has to go through an initialization loading the default scene.)  The display seems to  "whiten" a bit longer, but I imagine the program needs to go through a lot of calculations to get to a point where the preview begins to display the loaded scene.  It will use all your CPU cores as set in preferences, so it could grab a lot of resources if your settings use all cores.

My system has 8 cores/16 thread so in the image below shows all 16 threads getting a 50% to 75% load when doing a File|New (right side of each thread display.)  I'm sure Matt can explain this better than my guesses.



(04Dec20) Ryzen 1800x, 970 EVO 1TB M.2 SSD, Corsair Vengeance 64GB DDR4 3200 Mem,  EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Graphics 457.51 (04Dec20), Win 10 Pro x64, Terragen Pro 4.5.43 Frontier, BenchMark 0:10:02

Kadri


Maybe not related directly to your problem but in the past (if i remember correctly) when i set affinity to 7 cores it stayed that way.
Now it changes so far i see. Not much a problem but a little annoying.

I have kind of the same problems like you have too like the OS stuttering-freesing for a short time.
But loading and saving doesn't look much different to me.

jaf

Kadri, but do you mean "Preferred number of cores" in Edit|Preferences?  Mine only changes when I change it -- it's not stored in the tgd files.

(04Dec20) Ryzen 1800x, 970 EVO 1TB M.2 SSD, Corsair Vengeance 64GB DDR4 3200 Mem,  EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Graphics 457.51 (04Dec20), Win 10 Pro x64, Terragen Pro 4.5.43 Frontier, BenchMark 0:10:02

Kadri

Quote from: jaf on August 18, 2017, 08:12:24 PM
Kadri, but do you mean "Preferred number of cores" in Edit|Preferences?  Mine only changes when I change it -- it's not stored in the tgd files.

Sorry, i had to be more precise. I mean the "affinity" option in the Windows TaskManager.

jaf

No problem.  I almost wrote that I have had a few "delays" in win10 (at least I attributed those to win10) that I didn't notice in winXP.)  I still have problems (sometimes) if  I pause and later resume a TG4 render or abort a population.
(04Dec20) Ryzen 1800x, 970 EVO 1TB M.2 SSD, Corsair Vengeance 64GB DDR4 3200 Mem,  EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Graphics 457.51 (04Dec20), Win 10 Pro x64, Terragen Pro 4.5.43 Frontier, BenchMark 0:10:02

Dune

I don't have any of these problems on win 7, so maybe it's win 10?


Oshyan

Threading for the *renderer* hasn't changed as far as I recall. It's just for the 3D Previews. This *could* affect the loading issues, etc. you're seeing, but should not have an impact on system resources and freezing, stuttering, etc. *during* rendering.

We're seeing some various issues like this which may be related, but are hard to track down. We'll look into it, but if anyone can come up with a very reliably reproducible process to replicate the issue that would be extremely helpful.

Affinity is an operating system feature, TG has no effect on it, so if it "stuck" previously, it's not something that changed in TG.

- Oshyan

pokoy

I'm on Win 10 if it helps, I have a Win 7 render node that I'm going to test with the same scene files and see if there's any difference, will report later.

pokoy

After briefly testing the same files on Win 10 and Win 7 it really looks like Win 7 doesn't suffer from the occasional hangs/stalls. I can't say for sure but it could really be related to Win 10.

jaf

I went from XP to win10 and notice more temporary "hangs" now.  It's more prevalent with TG, but then TG usually puts more of a load on the system. 

I just shake my head now when I look at the number of processes (mostly Microsoft) running under win10.  Chrome also can be resource heavy.

I think win10 has a "game mode" that might be worth exploring.
(04Dec20) Ryzen 1800x, 970 EVO 1TB M.2 SSD, Corsair Vengeance 64GB DDR4 3200 Mem,  EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 Graphics 457.51 (04Dec20), Win 10 Pro x64, Terragen Pro 4.5.43 Frontier, BenchMark 0:10:02

pokoy

After working with a scene on Win 7 earlier today I have to say that Win 7 suffers from the same problem, disabling the 3d preview didn't help, unfortunately. These short freezes where never a problem with older TG versions.

archonforest

Quote from: pokoy on August 22, 2017, 08:05:41 AM
After working with a scene on Win 7 earlier today I have to say that Win 7 suffers from the same problem, disabling the 3d preview didn't help, unfortunately. These short freezes where never a problem with older TG versions.

I do not have lags on Win 7..but I have TG 4.0.4
Dell T5500 with Dual Hexa Xeon CPU 3Ghz, 32Gb ram, GTX 1080
Amiga 1200 8Mb ram, 8Gb ssd

pokoy

I wonder how TG 4.1.11 behaves for you. It's definitely showing the lags and freezes for me.