I've had an issue when caching out the FLIP compressed cache from a guided ocean layer setup.

It doesn't seem to be related to my amount of available RAM, VRAM or Point Separation on the FLIP Object.

Once the caching starts, I get strange hangs, or stalls where the cache saving will randomly stop in its process. The little cache save window is just sitting mid way through the calculations.

This can happen on anywhere throughout the cache save process. Sometimes I can't save past frame 2, sometimes it will get up to frame 12, other times frame 40.

Now, this morning after dreaming about my FLIP problems (no joke) I decided to try ‘Save To Disk In Background’ instead of the usual ‘Save To Disk’ - This time it worked! It made it all the way through the cache save process. Great!

The only issue remaining is that this background save process is only using roughly %75 of my CPU.

What could this issue be? I'm not too fond of only being able to cache out FLIP sims at %75 of the CPU speed available.

I've had a friend cache the same scene on another PC without trouble.

Maybe a file write issue?

My setup:
Windows 10
Houdini 18.0.348
AMD 2920X
64GB RAM
2080Ti GPU

I have since upgraded to Houdini v18.0.416 and now I am unable to even use ‘Save to disk in background’

I get the error ‘Cannot perform background render with unsaved changes’ - Even if the file is saved and has only just been saved, directly before licking save to disk in background.

So now I am unable to do either of the save operations!

As a last resort, I have the file cache SOP set to write files and I am playing down the timeline.

This seems incredibly strange. Has anyone else had these troubles?

Did you ever find a solution to this issue?

I have a new system and am experiencing the same issue. Running flip sim Houdini will randomly stop at some point through the frame range. I have an AMD 32-core threadripper and I disabled the core performance boost thinking that might be the problem, however, the same issue persists.

Hi, yes after upgrading to the latest version of Houdini (which was a while back now, as my initial post was a few months back) The caching issues did stop.

I never set this thread to solved because I wanted to do more large ocean cache tests to see if it was truly fixed.