Hi Folks,

I just wanted to make you aware of a bug that is affecting Houdini on macOS (at least on my iMac Pro with Vega 64 video card).
I've been working with support on this to provide as much information as possible but I'm sharing this issue here so folks are careful before upgrading.
The bug is causing major slow downs after a few minutes working in Houdini and appears to be a leak with how QT is releasing (or lack thereof) the QWidget objects on Big Sur.
I've downgraded from Big Sur to High Sierra and then back to Catalina and both of these OS do not exhibit the problem.

I've made a quick video to demonstrate the problem: https://1drv.ms/v/s!Aos_xSmX65yym_MnQZHAvU_-1IZGiQ?e=FhpqNc

If you run this python snippet in the Shell, you'll see the count of QWidget objects keeps increasing as you hover over the TAB menu (it does not do that on previous OS). After a 10 minutes session, Houdini becomes so slow you need to restart it to get back to normal.



So be careful before upgrading (at least if you have an iMac Pro with a Vega 64). It could be a driver bug with the Vega 64 but whoever is working on Big Sur and does not experience this slow down please let us know which Video Card you are using so we can tell whether it's specific to AMD video cards or a more widespread problem.

Thank you

Sorry to revive this old post but hoping one dev will see this. I recently bought a MacBook Pro 14 (M1 Max) and I have the same problem as on my intel mac. Essentially, Houdini pegs 20% of the `windowserver` process (process responsible for the OS UI display) when it starts and as I work in Houdini the CPU time of this process as well as the hindie process keeps climbing up to 90% CPU utilization on the `windowserver` process in macOS. The only solution is to kill Houdini and start it up again.
There is either a resource leak as mentioned above OR somehow the thread responsible to paint the UI is causing the slowdown overtime.
I have tried to 3 different Macs with varying hardware so I am pretty confident it's a bug in Houdini. If you look a the CPU utilizing at startup you will see what I mean, Hindi and windowserver will start right away and continuously consuming 20% CPU and it keeps climbing from that point on.

Maybe related, or maybe not… but something I experience with Houdini 19 is that whenever I hide/unhide the Houdini application, MacOS goes completely unresponsive for around 10-15 seconds.

+1 … I am seeing this with Big Sur on an Intel Mac.

Cheers,
Tim

+1 1. Something is really wrong with H19 on Macs right now. Have to restart a lot because the user interface gets stuttering after a while. I am testing H19.383 and H19.455 on M1 Max 16" laptop. Feels fast and nice first minutes, the get slower in a random way. Also anything that has to do with LOPS seems more or less broken.

Yup, same here; just gets slower and slower. Haven't been able to consistently reproduce it yet, other than… use Houdini on a Mac. It's odd because the system resources all appear fine (although the window server behaviour looks suspicious), but the Houdini ui becomes increasingly janky over time (iMac Pro, macOS i2.0.1 fwiw). There has been issues with ui redraw and window focus since H16; a bunch of them got fixed recently, but this still seems to be an issue.

If anyone can reproduce this it'd be great to get a ticket in.

Houdini keeps printing QT errors to the terminal:


I guess it's probably benign, but does look worrisome. Wish it wouldn't spam up my terminal though.

QT seems to be really bad in so many ways. Especially on Mac. Using old crusty deprecated APIs etc and it got the industry by a strangle hold. Just look how much better stuff are in SW that uses their own code like Blender, 3DCoat, Adobe, Resolve etc etc. In addition, I get the impression that H is using a combo of all the patterns in C++ design with boost and QT that results in "death by a 1000 paper cuts": There are no specific place where the big problem is, rather it is a little wrong all over the place.

I'm not sure if it's related, but feels just like the same here.
There are no specific errors, but it gets slower and slower over time.
Typically after using around 1 hours or so, I won't be able to drag the viewport smoothly.(or even inside the network view)
Only thing that helps is to restart Houdini.

Once when I asked for support about this, I was told to set this inside Houdini.env:


It got a little better than before, but the situation still remained.
It seems to solve some problem inside viewport, not around UI.
I hope SideFX could look into this someday seriously.