MacOs stablity / performance

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anon_user_37409885: Member; 4189 posts; Joined: June 2012; Offline

Sept. 6, 2019 10:33 p.m.

Everytime I try to do anything more than a sphere, Houdini on MacOs crashes, sample crash attached. Is anyone able to use it on MacOs for proper work? I dont have time to send in bug reports as I can just switch to Linux these days.

Sample crash report shows trying to modify a material transparency with Vellum and IPR.

MacOs 10.14.6, Amd card.H17.5.364

Edited by anon_user_37409885 - Sept. 28, 2019 19:54:11

Attachments:
crash.Modelling.rat_4551_log.txt (7.3 KB)
Modelling.hipnc (963.9 KB)


rhamm1320: Member; 8 posts; Joined: Jan. 2019; Offline

Sept. 6, 2019 11:19 p.m.

Works well for me on the lowest end iMac Pro


anon_user_37409885: Member; 4189 posts; Joined: June 2012; Offline

Sept. 7, 2019 12:26 a.m.

Thanks for looking into it. I too can reload this scene and it works.

I guess the question is when working on building something there is *always* an issue. Do you have similar issues when using Houdini MacOS? Building something and it crashes.


Midphase: Member; 833 posts; Joined: Jan. 2018; Offline

Sept. 7, 2019 1:47 a.m.

Nope, but in my experience 9 times out of 10, crashes in OS X can be traced down to incorrect file permissions, particularly for cache files.

>>Kays
For my Houdini tutorials and more visit:
https://www.youtube.com/c/RightBrainedTutorials [www.youtube.com]


anon_user_37409885: Member; 4189 posts; Joined: June 2012; Offline

Sept. 7, 2019 1:51 a.m.

Thanks, that sounds promising. How did you go about diagnosing and fixing those file permissions?

Cheers!


Midphase: Member; 833 posts; Joined: Jan. 2018; Offline

Sept. 7, 2019 1:57 a.m.

I start by looking at where the cache files are being saved to, and see if the permissions is set up read and write for everyone. I will also apply the setting to any folders and files which are contained in the folder, to ensure that there are no weird write permission denials which will trigger a crash.

Houdini has been pretty stable for me, but occasionally it will crash. Weirdly enough, at least for me, what triggers crashes most of the time is if I delete nodes from my network. Like for instance if I have a UV Texture node and then add a UV Layout node, then I decide to delete the UV Layout node, Houdini will crash.

>>Kays
For my Houdini tutorials and more visit:
https://www.youtube.com/c/RightBrainedTutorials [www.youtube.com]


anon_user_37409885: Member; 4189 posts; Joined: June 2012; Offline

Sept. 7, 2019 8:12 p.m.

hey! thanks a lot.

It's very curious, the only file I see that I'm not familiar with is one that has extended attributes.

Maybe an Apple setting is stuffing up Houdini's temp files somehow on this machine.

Attachments:
Screen Shot 2019-09-08 at 10.10.04 am.png (43.0 KB)


Midphase: Member; 833 posts; Joined: Jan. 2018; Offline

Sept. 8, 2019 2:10 p.m.

I'm not familiar with that file.

Here's what I will say:

1. I use Houdini Indie on my Mac Book Air running the latest OSX and have no issues with it. As I mentioned, it will occasionally crash but it's rare and not any worse than other apps. Plus I'm running on a very slow CPU with no GPU and only 8Gb of RAM.

2. I use Houdini also on my main workstation, it's a Hackintosh running an 8700k i7 and 2 1080ti GPU's. Since I need Nvidia drivers, I'm forced to stick to High Sierra but once again everything runs like a dream except for some rare occasional crashes (not any more frequent than when I use Fusion or Adobe apps).

So for me, Houdini is pretty damn stable, even when I am doing large scenes with thousands of instances and billions of polygons.

What that should tell you is that Houdini can function incredibly well in OSX.

Aside from the above-mentioned permission issues, nothing beats a re-install if you're running into weird crashes. I would also suggest perhaps doing a RAM check to make sure you're not dealing with malfunctioning RAM (rare but possible). Lastly, if all else fails, my final go-to solution is to do a full OSX reinstall. It can be a massive PITA, but sometimes it's necessary.

>>Kays
For my Houdini tutorials and more visit:
https://www.youtube.com/c/RightBrainedTutorials [www.youtube.com]


anon_user_37409885: Member; 4189 posts; Joined: June 2012; Offline

Sept. 8, 2019 6:44 p.m.

That's great to hear!

And does your scenes use all the Houdini tricks too? i.e. abc, pyro, fluids, hair etc.

Oh, do you also use a Wacom tablet?

Edited by anon_user_37409885 - Sept. 8, 2019 18:53:37


Midphase: Member; 833 posts; Joined: Jan. 2018; Offline

Sept. 9, 2019 2:52 a.m.

I use pyro a good bit, and Vellum for cloth and grain solving. I don't use a Wacom tablet.

>>Kays
For my Houdini tutorials and more visit:
https://www.youtube.com/c/RightBrainedTutorials [www.youtube.com]


anon_user_37409885: Member; 4189 posts; Joined: June 2012; Offline

Sept. 9, 2019 4:22 a.m.

Thank you.

I'm thinking the crashes have something to do with Wacom drivers. A new driver yesterday was installed and so far no crashes…

Do you ever get viewport shuddering for no reason? i.e. the whole interface slows down from clippy fast to about 14Hz. Closing the Scene View and opening a new one fixes it.


anon_user_37409885: Member; 4189 posts; Joined: June 2012; Offline

Sept. 9, 2019 5:17 p.m.

Now MacOs doesn't appear to crash I'm running into graphics glitches. Can anyone on MacOs test this please.

The particles turn into massive black square in the viewport.

EDIT: Bug logged with SideFx

Edited by anon_user_37409885 - Sept. 10, 2019 16:44:25

Attachments:
Screen Shot 2019-09-10 at 7.13.06 am.png (2.1 MB)
Screen Shot 2019-09-10 at 7.13.10 am.png (2.2 MB)
Extrudy.hipnc (1.9 MB)
Houdini_Info.txt (9.8 KB)


Midphase: Member; 833 posts; Joined: Jan. 2018; Offline

Sept. 9, 2019 9:31 p.m.

What machine are you running it on?

Something looks like it's going terribly wrong, I would blame the GPU or the memory.

>>Kays
For my Houdini tutorials and more visit:
https://www.youtube.com/c/RightBrainedTutorials [www.youtube.com]


mestela: Member; 1736 posts; Joined: May 2006; Offline

Sept. 9, 2019 11:46 p.m.

The black squares is usually because your input geometry has a material assigned. See if your particles have a shop_materialpath attribute, if so, that's the problem.

Houdini assumes that if you've defined materials in that way on your particles, that you've assigned a sprite material and tries to display it. If it's not a sprite material, you get this weirdness.

Simple fix is to put down an attribute delete sop, and delete shop_materialpath.

Edited by mestela - Sept. 9, 2019 23:47:09

http://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki [www.tokeru.com]
https://www.patreon.com/mattestela [www.patreon.com]


anon_user_37409885: Member; 4189 posts; Joined: June 2012; Offline

Sept. 11, 2019 2:18 a.m.

I appreciate everyones contribution. The Mac is very stable without a single crash over 3 days now. To summarize for future reference:

Wacom appears to have been the culprit of both crashes and stuttering of the viewport. Driver 6.3.36-2 appears to fix that.

The black squares appearing on particles is a bug in on all platforms of Houdini, not just MacOS, and has been logged.

There was an additional issue that has been resolved now too, the viewport was flashing blue when being tumbled, that was the Dell monitor doing some so-called Advanced Video enhancement.

Hope this can help others!


anon_user_37409885: Member; 4189 posts; Joined: June 2012; Offline

Sept. 20, 2019 6:02 p.m.

Can someone on MacOs please try to recreate a freeze I'm consistantly getting.

Simply place a grid down in the scene, switch to the Render View tab, start a render and tear the pane off. The click back on the viewport tab. Houdini then hangs and you have to force quit it. Tested with fresh preferences. Support couldn't reproduce it and on Linux its fine.

H17.5.381, MacOs 10.14.6, AMD.

Sample crash report attached.

Edited by anon_user_37409885 - Sept. 20, 2019 18:51:06

Attachments:
crash.untitled.rat_19297_log.txt (11.0 KB)


Midphase: Member; 833 posts; Joined: Jan. 2018; Offline

Sept. 20, 2019 6:46 p.m.

I can try it a bit later today, but if support can reproduce it then I'd say it's definitely a bug.

>>Kays
For my Houdini tutorials and more visit:
https://www.youtube.com/c/RightBrainedTutorials [www.youtube.com]


anon_user_37409885: Member; 4189 posts; Joined: June 2012; Offline

Sept. 20, 2019 6:52 p.m.

Thanks for testing - meant to write that support couldn't reproduce the bug. (edited that now.)

Logged as bug #99674.

Edited by anon_user_37409885 - Oct. 4, 2019 18:09:36


Midphase: Member; 833 posts; Joined: Jan. 2018; Offline

Sept. 20, 2019 8:36 p.m.

Yup, I can reproduce on my end in 10.13.6 with Nvidia GPUs. Houdini hangs as soon as I tear the pane off.

>>Kays
For my Houdini tutorials and more visit:
https://www.youtube.com/c/RightBrainedTutorials [www.youtube.com]


anon_user_37409885: Member; 4189 posts; Joined: June 2012; Offline

Sept. 28, 2019 7:22 p.m.

Segwaying into performance now - when dragging a null around, the viewport refresh with the paramater pane open, is super slow and clunky. On MacOs its dropping to <8fps, whilst Linux is >50fps.

Is this similar to other Mac users or just this older setup.

EDIT - oh the slow down appears to be the Network view - hiding it and keeping the parameter pane open, keeps the speed up.

Thanks!

bug #99819.

Edited by anon_user_37409885 - Oct. 4, 2019 18:09:21

Attachments:
SlowViewport.gif (306.4 KB)
MacOs_Performance.hipnc (44.8 KB)

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