Long Load Times – Why is this still a problem?
lcattus_9716520438
Posts: 31
My complex scenes take literally hours to load. As I understand it DAZ scans all the morphs so that it can build adjustment menu items for each component. So once the scene is loaded why can’t all the menu information be then saved with the scene? Can someone explain what’s going on and why?
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If your scene takes hours to load, it isn't because of the number of characters and morphs you have installed, but because of the conflicts between them.
The log can help you in figuring out which ones. (Help -> Troubleshooting -> View Log File)
My scenes rarely take more than 5 minutes to load. A single G8 figure takes maybe a minute. However, sometimes it does get a little stuck and I sit staring at the screen. Generally I find some other activity to distravt me for a few minutes. Having said that, the sooner DAZ come up with a better way of loading scenes, the happier I will be. I don't have hundreds of characters but I do have a lot of morph packages because that's how I create my own characters. Maybe there's a lesson there?
I'll be even happier if they find a way to reduce the lag between closing DAZ Studio and being able to reopen it. That can take much longer than the load times.
I imagine that there are many variables that affect the shutdown time for Daz Studio. Early last year (or maybe late 2021), I was experiencing long shutdown times before DS was available to reboot. Many times, I resorted to forcing its shutdown via the Windows Task Manger. Something changed for my system in late 2021 or in 2022 and DS almost immediately shuts down now, I just loaded a scene from Elf Village and World Builder (https://www.daz3d.com/elf-village-and-world-builder) and timed Daz Studio's shutdown using an online stopwatch site. The shutdown time as about 2 seconds. I’m running DS on a Windows 10 laptop with 16 Gb RAM, Nvidia 2060 with 6 Gb VRAM, and a 9th generation Intel i7 CPU.
For the sake of comparison, I have a Windows 11 PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, 64GB RAM and a RTX 3090 with 24GB.
If I load a scene without characters, the shutdown is quick - gone from Task Manager in seconds no matter how many objects in the scene. When I have more than one G8 (especially G8F characters) the shutdown delay is lengthy - several minutes (usually between 5 and 10 minutes). I can't help but think this problem and the load time problem are related.
DS cleans after itself, clearing the registers, memory addresses, wiping the dust off under the bed and on the top shelves - That takes time especially when one has a scene that takes 20-40+GB's of RAM.
Sometimes shutting down DS hangs and never finishes, one culprit I have found is duplicate morph files, which may have erroneously been included in some unrelated product (usually freebies)
I second PerttiA's idea. If you cannot figure it out from the log, you may attach it in here. We may help to check. I ever helped a guy to check his log, as the load time of his scene (not complex) was 17 mins. After finding the culprits of 'duplciate formulas' and fixing them, the load time fell to 3 mins 20 secs...
So, most of the time, the similar problem did not result from the number of assets you installed, the culprits must be some 'errors'...
Thanks guys! I tried to open the log file and Daz immediatley crashed. Is the log file an actual windows file and if so does anyone know where it's located?
DS crashed when you opened Log file from menu: Help - Troubleshooting - View Log File... ?
Open your File Browser, enter %AppData%\DAZ 3D\Studio4\ into path field... where the file of 'log.txt' locates
Thanks - got it
I think I understand that but, in my experience, I have never used a PC application that was noticeably slow to close. I've used some pretty resource-hungry apps in the past which close and re-open immediately. This leads me to the conclusion that something is amiss with the application design. I'm no programmer but my son is a software developer and his comment to my question: "bad design".
DS has the load / clean mechanism of its own and the performance of QT is low... DS was developed with QT 4 while the latest version of QT is QT 6. Marvelous Designer was developed with QT 5, it also has low performance in some scenarios, e.g. Synchronizing, Saving... So it's not simply and purely an issue of 'bad design'... various reasons.
That's true.
It's almost like the difference between doing a quick format and the longer one that erases all the existing data from the drive.
Good analogy.
Maybe with DS5 (if I live long enough) we will see the improvements we are all hoping for.
From what I have seen, loading a scene is a recursion feature. You've noticed the little yellow progress bar down at the right bottom as the system processes overlapping fits and shells and what nots. Now consider, when you load a scene, these all have to be reloaded, but, and here's the problem, there is no way to tell the system to stop fitting asynchronously. So, it loads the first thing, takes a bit. Then, you load another, then a morph, which sends fit commands to all the clothes, and then another morph, which sends refit commands to everyting before it, very soon you are in a factorial game, N! and your load times go crazy. Want to test? Unfit everyting, clothes, shells, morphs you can leave alone, and save as a new scene. Loads fast, doesn't it?
There is some utility that I bought from DAZ a few years ago that goes through your directories and renames the extensions of the morph's you want to "turn off". It really improved load times. But, I forgot the name of the product! I am looking at DAZ again after a hiatus, and am trying to remember what this thing was called and how to invoke it!
Turbo Loader? https://www.daz3d.com/turbo-loader-for-genesis-8-and-81
Also, when it comes to shutting down DS, I've found that if after Saving my Scene, I select everything in the Scene Tab, hit Delete, close DS.
When I do this I never have to wait more than 10 seconds before I can open DS again.
I restart DS all the time to avoid "Not Responding" issues when trying to move to a different Scene without closing DS, and it's made a world of difference to empty the Scene Tab before closing DS.
Yes! I found it when I went back to look at my order history, and Richard Haseltine had already posted the answer.
I do object to having to buy something to fix a problem that should be addressed by the developers. If a PA can address it, then surely the DAZ team are better placed?
The PA has provided a (not without its drawbacks) workaround, using Connect to install content as needed is another (because if you try to load a scene without the content installed you will be prompted to install it), and the public Build has had some work done on loading that has (for me) roughly halved the tiem taken when there are no errors and pretty much eliminated the massive slowdown caused by Duplicate Formula warnings (not to mention providing more useful information about those in the log).
What I do is have my G8 morphs all in a seperate "morphs" runtime and the ones I use in an always loaded runtime. Main Library, Used Library, Creation Library.
What I normally have the main library with props, clothes, etc loaded all the time, the used library all the time, and I only "connect" the creation library when making a new character. I dial spin the character, save it, unhook the creation library. I then load the character again and move only those morphs it says is missing into my "used" one. This definitely speeds up loading. Sometimes I will create a 3rd library if the character is only a one off or I only plan to use it in a few renders. When done I just move the morphs back into "creation."
It must be years since I had a Duplicate Formula error - did they happen with G8? I use G8 almost exclusively now. So I have not seen any improvement with successive Public Builds. Also, I don't use Connect and probably never will do. Again these are sticking plaster "solutions" and the real problem is still prevalent.
They can happen with anything, and yes I had some with Genesis 8. A duplicate formula warning means that there are two bits of ERC code linking a property named Soandso to a property named Suchandsuch - either two frmulae linking the same properties (usually user-error, running ERC Freeze twice for example) or two different add ons using the same name for one of their properties and linking to a common property (such as a character shape linking to joint centres), or to a different pair of properties which also share a name (such as GenericCharacterNameFBM to GenericCharacterNameBody).
There definitely have been duplicate formula errors with G8 (& G8.1) products. We're probably not going to be rid of those until all PAs are using Daz Studio v4.21.1.29 or higher.
Np kidding. It routinely takes 5 minutes for the program to close. That is absurd. The scene loading mechanism is really awful. Every scene that I load has hundreds if not thousands of errors in the log. Surely there must be a better way to do that.
So then, how do you remove duplicate formulas? And what about the myriad "formula target property not found", "formula object property not found", "modifier not found", and "modifier not created" errors?
Another thing that causes no end of problems is that DS puts some textures for some scenes in a temp dir. If that dir is cleared, the scene load brings up error boxs. Why in the worlds would they put something critical to a scene in a temp directory?
There appear to be many lagacy problems with the code that have gotten worse as the program has become more complex. I imagine getting rid of some of those problems would take a complete redesign and rewrite of the software. And that would then probably prevent the loading of old scene files. I am not criticising the programmers here. Such legacy problems abound in complex programs that have been expanded upon for years. There is likely no easy solution that solves most of the problems.
The problems you list, are not DS problems. They are content related problems caused by (mostly) inexperienced content creators, often some freebies.
The fix is to uninstall the content that is causing problems, file a ticket if it was a Daz store bought item / send feedback to the creator if it wasn't and wait for a fix.
Textures in the temp folder will most likely be the working version of Layered Images, which are stored as recipes. If you move the Layered Textures slider in Edit>Preferences>Interface rightwards, for size/speed, it will spend less time compressing the png files when it creates them and scenes with layered Images will load more quickly.
Many of the messages you report are warning, not errors, and simply reflect the fact that some proeprties you have installed have links to other properties (e.g corrective morphs for expressions, to make them work well with the related shape) which you do not have installed.
Duplicate formula errors are removed by changing the ID contained in the file(s), generally.
Check if the products have had an update, if not, it's a relatively trivial matter to edit the file(s) with a text editor, only issue is how many files you may need to fix.
I use Notepad++ as it allows the loading and changing of multiple files at once in a single instance.
The other issues can be related to content you may not have, typographical errors in the files(e.g. a path error) or errors that were left in during development and qc didn't catch.
The first issue requires procuring the related assets. For the other issues, check if there's been an update that corrects the issue, if not, submit a ticket about the problem, or edit the related files to correct the issue.
I'd be interested to see an example of this issue, if you have one.
AFAIK, the only things, directly in DS not 3rd party addons, that use the temp directory are LIE(Layered image editor) and 3delight. Neither put any information related to the temp directory in a scene file.
Some 3rd party products do use the temp directory, such as scene optimizer, but they don't reference it in any scene file i've looked at, and while they may leave files in there(wasting disk space), they don't appear to be used by DS in any testing i've done.
What are some example of the problems you're referring to?
The issues you're referring to in this post aren't problems with DS, but are related to asset developers.
Duplicate formula's are going to happen as there's no effective way to compare every asset that's ever been created for use in DS.
If i remember correctly, the latest version of DS(4.22.0.16) attempts to address this issue by forcing unique ids in files, but that doesn't solve the problem if the developer is using an older version of DS or manually edits the files.
The other issues i've alread covered.
As for DS breaking scenes/content, they have no problem doing that. The transition from 3 to 4 broke a lot of stuff, 4.5(iirc, correct me if i'm wrong here)) rendered many scene files(daz format) unable to load, certain assets now load with IK chains that need to be deleted to keep them from doing weird stuff while posing/animating(flipper foot).
I've got folders full of scripts, plugins, scenes and assets that are useless due to all the changes over the years, thousands of dollars flushed, and a laundry list of things that i have to do to work around various 'improvements' that have been made.
No, these are 100% DAZ problems. The framework is theirs, and good frameworks protect the system from errors of all kinds. That's kind of the whole point of a framework; to maintain the integrity of data loaded into the system at all times and not let user (the PAs) errors, which are inevitable, to degrade the user experience. It makes no sense to burden/entrust the carbon based part of the system to get a large set of data perfectly correct. That's what computers are for and they're a heck of a lot better at it.