Wanted to ask the forum about this before posting a bug…

Running a series of tests on a dual-boot system to compare Win 10 and Linux (Mint) performance.

In Windows, if I turn on Memory Stats in the performance monitor in a simple Pyro scene with a large division size (0.1), I get an almost negligible difference in performance. With Memory Stats off, the sim finishes in 46.52 seconds, and with Memory Stats on it finishes in 47.05 seconds.

In Linux, I'm seeing a consistently different story. With Memory Stats off, the sim completes in 48.73 seconds. With Memory Stats on, it completes in 2 minutes 59 seconds.

And the differential seems to be frame-based; the longer the duration of the test, the bigger the performance differential.

Have tried this with several different scenes/types of sims (pyro, flip, grain) and it's consistent.

Anyone else run into this? Is this a known issue?

Hello,

It's not a known issue but I wonder if it's related to the fact that Houdini uses the jemalloc library for memory allocation. That would explain why there's a difference between Windows and Linux.

What happens if you disable Houdini from using jemalloc when profiling?

There's instructions on how to disable jemalloc on this help page (look for the note under Memory Stats):
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/panes/perfmon.html [www.sidefx.com]

Cheers,
Rob