Problem has been solved, see post marked SOLVED for solution.

Hi,

I am compiling HDK plugins using hcustom and it takes quite a while even for the most basic nodes. I also have to restart Houdini to register the new changes (or at least have Houdini closed for hcustom to compile successfully).

Thus, any time I want to change any code, the iteration to do so takes at least 2-3 minutes from when I hit compile just to see my change in action. While this seems petty, this really slows down development time compared to Python or VEX where I can see changes almost instantly.

I suppose that's one of the tradeoffs for the power of the HDK but does anyone have any tips on how to speed things up?

Thanks!

Use inlineCPP instead. Speed of HDK. Flexibility of Python. No need to quit houdini.

As I don't know working solution, and using inlineCPP isn't always feasible I usually create a script which compiles and opens Houdini on the run, possible without even a gui, just processing sops and saving geo for gplay to inspect. But even with a gui reopen, it takes me like ~10 seconds to compile and reopen Houdini on Linux. It clearly resists in memory after a couple of times. Not perfect compared to simple reloading dso, but still not as dramatic as 2 minutes of waste on every edit… this would be prohibitive.

Thanks for the replies. Using inlinecpp will be a good idea for most cases, so I'll do that. However, I have two issues:

Whenever I try to use inlinecpp.createLibrary I get a “fatal error LNK1104” saying that it can't open the library file that it's trying to create. Any ideas what's going wrong? I get this even when entering the code in the first example http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini13.0/hom/extendingwithcpp [sidefx.com]

Second, whether calling hcustom through the command line tools or calling inlinecpp.createLibrary, my computer is taking over 70 seconds to compile even the most basic code. This seems way too long. Is there something wrong with my setup that I might be able to debug? My system is a 6-core 3.2Ghz, 16Gb RAM, so I don't think it's the hardware. :?

Thanks for the help

EDIT: It is also suspicious that it takes over 20 seconds for the splash screen to display after hitting the Houdini icon. Could these be related?

EDIT: I also have a delay of almost exactly 20 seconds when importing an OBJ. I watch the performance monitor and nothing happens until a CPU spike at 20 seconds and the model loads right then.

I smell firewall/license server issue.

Yup - we're thinking the same. Trying a handful of debugging tests and I'll let you know how it goes.

If anyone has any insights on the inlinecpp compile error I posted above, please let me know!

Update: I ran some tests on other computers that are connected to the same network hub and none of them have this big delay issue. So it looks like the problem is with my actual machine, although it could still involve licenses. Any ideas? Guess the issue is back open

SOLVED:

Finally found the problem! After two days of trying all odds and ends we finally did a trace on hcmd.exe on both my machine and a good machine. We found that the broken machine was loading “Forefront TMG ClientFwcWsp64.dll”. After uninstalling the Forefront Client and its patches/updates and a system restart, the problem was solved!

The Houdini splash screen now comes up instantly, command line tools come up instantly, code compiles in 12 seconds instead of 70, and obj's no longer have a 20 second delay on import. Yay.

So, long story short, get rid of Forefront if you’re seeing any of those problems. Thanks to those who offered ideas.

With the combination of a script that compiles+opens Houdini, iteration time has gone from about 2 minutes down to 15 seconds