We're noticing that our saves from Houdini in Windows is really painfully slow over SMB. However, other applications that we're using don't seem to suffer from this problem. The file sizes in Houdini are much smaller as well.

Any one run into this or have some suggestions?

Thanks.

It sounds like apples and oranges to me, on the surface. Houdini is just calling the system and saying “save this”. It's up to the SMB layer to deal with it(and it's not the speediest thing in the world). Can you give an idea what you mean by saving? Is it a hip from from the current session, saving an image, saving out geometry…?

Having said that, I believe there are some known issues such as having your $HOME/houdini9.0 on a network share over an additional layer like SMB that can cause speed hits.

Mixing OS's causes issues. Doesn't mean this particular thing is unsolvable, though. I'd try to isolate things, try comparing things that are doing the same sort of operation(which admittedly is tricky).

Cheers,

J.C.

Just HIP files that I've noticed it in. The old fashion File-Save. Caching out data or writing out BGEOs and images do not seem to be affected by this elusive slowness.

It could very well be the network or the SMB server - however in the apples and oranges arena - the other applications and almost all other save like operations in Houdini are not affected.

You could set the environment variabel HOUDINI_BUFFEREDSAVE=1 Maybe this helps.

Pagefan

Thanks Pagefan!

That works! In fact it was so fast at first it made me suspicious that it actually saved.

Thanks again.

Although this is a very old thread, by setting HOUDINI_BUFFEREDSAVE=1 makes saving hip file faster, but I'm facing the similar slowness issue when saving alembic file over network, I tried HOUDINI_IOBUFFER_SIZE, but it seems not working in my case.
What else can I do to improve the speed to save alembic to network disk?


Thanks.