Hi,

I've been noticing lately, that the File chooser for image files inside Houdini is super sluggish, takes around 10 seconds just to open and after choosing the file almost the same time to close again.
Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this and how to troubleshoot it?

Cheers,
Ivan

Hi,

Do you display thumbnails? If so, I would recommend turning them off. Your best bet is to submit a bug though.

I had this issue but couldn't reproduce it reliably after a system restart so not sure what else might be causing it.

Thanks,
now that you mention it, I think it might always start after turning thumbnails on, but after turning them off, it continues to be terribly slow. I'll try to experiment with it a bit.

Cheers,
Ivan

ivanmalek
Thanks,
now that you mention it, I think it might always start after turning thumbnails on, but after turning them off, it continues to be terribly slow. I'll try to experiment with it a bit.

Cheers,
Ivan

I submitted as a bug and the reply is: I am not able to reproduce the issue

To be clear, it looks like once you've activated the thumbnail views in the file chooser, it keeps on computing the thumbnails even after you deactivate it. I've experimented quite a bit, and it also depends on the file types; some files ( for example TIFF) have an embedded thumbnail, and it doesn't affect the file chooser; but generally speaking, as of now, you can't deactivate the thumbnail preview computation after activating once during a session; 10 to 15 seconds is the expected time for a folder containing typically a few dozen of large scale jpg pictures; I can reproduce it all the time.
Only fix is to restart H.
You should definitively file a bug with the details of your installation, it may help to pinpoint the problem on their side. I've already spent quite some time doing it on my side and I'm not motivated to male a detailed bug report again TBH.

Have exactly same issue here. Might be cause I am using 3rd party render engine, 3delight in my case?

To answer the initial question:

"Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this and how to troubleshoot it?"

Two main cases were identified (1-2), and then I tested different storage mediums (3-4). There is also a difference when the thumbnails are hidden or shown.

1) This first case is a repeatable state. The initial folder set has many files and this will cause a delay before the window is open. The same delay occur when navigating to that same folder. Thumbnails are hidden but opening the folder is still slow on the nvme (m2/PCIE) storage medium.

2) The second case is that Houdini can be in a "negative" state, for unknown reason, that causes the file browser to have extreme delay (appx 2 min). A work around for this state is to restart Houdini, so the source is not the system itself. This bug is challenging to remove because it is unclear what causes this state. During my tests this only happened once, and during the first test. This severe state I could not reproduce.

To compare, the Dolphin File Browser will show the same folder with image thumbnails in less than a second no matter the image size and in all tests. The thumbnails seem to be cached because they are extremely fast to resize and view (less than a second).

Maybe the appended sequences make at least some of this issue easy to understand. There is no recording of the second case (2).

3) To do some more comparison, because this is a tricky case, I copied the same folder to a ramdisk. Now there is no delay whatsoever. However, now this is true only when the thumbnails are hidden. With thumbnails visible it is still slow. See output2.gif.

4) Also to compare some more I copied the same folder to my RAID (quad SSD:s in maximum performance mode). The window open instantly when thumbnails are hidden. However, with the thumbnails displayed it is quite slow.


I've done a lot of tests related to this.

Test case:

Add a geometry File browser.
Navigated to a folder with 216 images (36 PNG, 180 JPG), 219 MB.

Some HW specs:
Dual XEONS (32C with HT @ appx 3 GHz)
Samsung NVME M2 (PCIE) (nvme) / QUAD SSD:s in performance RAID (home) / Ramdisk (shm)
NVidia RTX 2080 (8 GB VRAM)
> 74 GB RAM

OS: Linux Debian with XFCE
Houdini version: Houdini 19.5.716

Edit: RFE/BUG reported 28 Oct 2023. If you have additional info please share it.

If anyone could please try to test this:

1. Navigate the File Browser of a File node to a folder with many images.

2. Enable the display of the images (right click).

3. Scroll through the images.

4. Close the browser (cancel).

5. Now, reopen the browser to that same location.

Is there a delay? If so, how severe? (From 1 sec at first I got 52 sec repeatably on a ramdisk)

Please note your OS as well.

Thanks for testing this. Absolutely ridiculous bug lol