When Houdini is evaluating (Cooking Op), there's messages that are being logged along with the time it takes in the bottom of the UI :



…is there a log that's being written somewhere?

I'm especially wondering if we can feed a log from Houdini Engine to our render manager to keep track of where our scene is taking lots of time or being jammed. We have some scenes that often locks up on our farm and we can't seem to be able to pinpoint what's going on and where it gets stuck. There must be a way to get more information on what Houdini is doing to help us find where it's jamming our render nodes?

Have a look at the Windows > Performance Monitor (Alt+Y)

Not fully knowledgeable of every feature of the Performance Editor, but I would like to have this as a scrollable log too.

Mainly because sometimes it starts recooking, and I don't even know why,
and manymany things recook but the message flits by so fast, I can't even read in what network this is happening.

Maybe the performance monitor can help? You can export the data as csv and there's a hou class for it too but I've never tried anything fancy with it.

Mainly because sometimes it starts recooking, and I don't even know why,

One gotcha is lights linked to something that cooks. Whenever I have mystery cooks I remember to check my lights. I'm sure there are many others.

Yes, but the OP's question was "is there logging in Houdini". The answers seems to be no. When something fails, you will never know why. That, more than anything else, makes it unusable in the majority of production workflows. I think a lot of studios would use this tool to a much greater degree if there were just some basic way to understand what is happening behind the scenes. You can be waiting for hours for something that eventually fails, and no error messages, no logs, nothing. I seriously wonder what the developers were thinking. A small yellow or red exclamation mark on your node is all you get.