Hi guys,
I've just wanted to drop some lines since I reinstalled last week my mac with Snow Leopard and found that Houdini 10 is really much slower on SL than on Leopard (not the display but the reactivity). It took almost 1 minute to launch it and when I setup a basic scene with a light (cast deep shadow), a grid and a sphere, the render take ages :cry:… to finally display the rendered image between 5/10 minutes later.
Here is what I get on the log :

2010-01-25 23:14:20.028 houdini invalid drawable
2010-01-25 23:14:20.034 houdini invalid drawable
2010-01-25 23:14:20.041 houdini invalid drawable
WARNING: The -background flag is not supported on OS X. Ignoring it…
mantra: Could not open imager


Any help would be really appreciate. Cheers.
Akril.

OSX 10.6.2
2G of RAM
2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo
ATI X1600

Well I have no problems here on Snow leopard. How about posting up the scene.

rob

circusmonkey
Well I have no problems here on Snow leopard. How about posting up the scene.

rob

Well… even if I try to launch a flipbook of 100 frames it takes ages do open Mplay (Image Viewer) to finally use the cpus doing nothing. And I still get this log in my shell :

2010-01-26 09:46:30.930 houdini invalid drawable
2010-01-26 09:46:30.933 houdini invalid drawable
2010-01-26 09:46:30.938 houdini invalid drawable
WARNING: The -background flag is not supported on OS X. Ignoring it…
WARNING: The -background flag is not supported on OS X. Ignoring it…
mantra: Could not open imager

Is there any tricks to do with Mplay ? like a hidden lock file or something like that ? I can play with Houdini, it's really cool (although it's much faster on linux :-/) and fun, but I can't launch any render using Mplay… so really boring for a fast feedback.

I would need some help please…
Cheers.

OSX 10.6.2
2G of RAM
2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo
ATI X1600
Houdini 10.0.528

From:

http://odforce.net/wiki/index.php/FrequentlyAskedQuestions [odforce.net]

Q: Houdini/Mantra seems to be running extremely slow compared to how I've seen it run on other machines.

1. Try disabling firewalls running on your machine.
2. Try disabling virus protection temporarily.
1. eg, OS/X: Realtime Protection on VirusBarrier is known to slow down communication between Mantra and MPlay.

jason_iversen
From:

http://odforce.net/wiki/index.php/FrequentlyAskedQuestions [odforce.net]

Q: Houdini/Mantra seems to be running extremely slow compared to how I've seen it run on other machines.

1. Try disabling firewalls running on your machine.
2. Try disabling virus protection temporarily.
1. eg, OS/X: Realtime Protection on VirusBarrier is known to slow down communication between Mantra and MPlay.

mmm… I don't have any virus protection and I turned Little snitch off… still the same. Does anybody have this kind of troubles ? Am I the only one ?
It could be worth for me to install VMware with a Ubuntu in order to get a proper fast Houdini setup… a shame anyway.

Help help help please !
Cheers.

ok so…. it appears that I'm the only one to get that issue since nobody has reply :?. Actually, I've even tried to use opensnoop in admin mode to get more details, but the display of the log start 1 minute later and doesn't gave me lot of informations. Is there any advanced tool which could allow to get some useful informations on that and to figure out what's going on ? It still takes ages for me to render something.

Just as a reminder. I've reinstalled my mac with Snow Leopard, I don't have any antivirus and I've deactivated Little Snitch for the test… but still the same.

So please any help would be appreciated :-) otherwise I will gonna be crazy.

Cheers.

it could be related to a slow DNS:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=16960 [sidefx.com]

You mentioned that you have a fresh OSX install, so any antivirus should not be a problem, but check out this thread too:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=15743 [sidefx.com]

Ok thanks Rafal for those links… thanks to you I figure out what was wrong in my config. The issue came from OSX and not Houdini…
By checking the hostname of my machine, in terminal I've get “kilipo” which is the name of my mac…. but in System Preferences/Sharing/Computer Name I've get “kilipoMac”. So by changing the last one, everything has been fixed. All those settings have been restored using Time Machine… so not easy at all to sort out that… Anyway thanks a lot to everyone !!

Cheers.

I have just installed apprentice and am having an identical problem.. I have no such discrepancy between my hostname and computer name. Both Houdini and the license app take between 1 and 2 minutes just to boot each let alone do any rendering.

same deal with:
11/05/10 10:44:35 AM .com.sidefx.Houdini 2010-05-11 10:44:35.924 houdini invalid drawable
11/05/10 10:44:35 AM houdini invalid drawable