tdlmake.exe sludge
westernnomad
Posts: 90
I'm not sure what happened and where it came from, but lately doing anything in Daz is like working in sludge. I brought up my task manager and found that my CPU is cranking at a steady 100% with multiple (3-5) instances of tdlmake.exe. I confirmed that it indeed comes from Daz. It appears to be related to texture optimization, but even when I switch to smooth shaded view it continues to crank away on my CPU making it almost impossible to use.
Is there any way to deactivate the tdlmake processes and give the option to optimize textures on demand rather than the real-time of tdlmake?
(I'd upgrade my RAM if I hadn't just blown my budget on a new video card and a few hundred dollars worth of stuff from the Daz store)
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Comments
Found this which sure is interesting. Give them 5 minutes at most to do their job at 'optimizing' then turn them off.
https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/entries/124604-why-does-daz-studio-just-say-optimizing-image-and-never-start-rendering
Just to note though, that's from 2010. But the advice should still be correct.
I also found that it doesn't like .png files that are 4 bit.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/5468/#69352
I'm reactivating this thread because I just ran into this problem and was wondering if anyone else has noticed this.
Here's how it started:
Last night I loaded a scene. Not huge by any means. I also fired up my MP3 player at the same time Daz was loading a scene. The music immediately started to stutter and repeat the last 3-4 seconds. Daz became totally unresponsive. After about 25 minutes of trying to regain control of my machine which included CTRL-ALT-DEL which, for the first time I've ever seen in my 20+ years of IT work, came up with an error that, not only could Windows not respond to it, but it recommended I actually power off my machine in order to reboot/recover. My machine finally came up with a BSOD. Upon reboot, I saw a BIOS error I'd never seen before, Critical CPU Temp Warning. I finally got my machine back up and working, and tonight I decided to figure out what happened.
I loaded the same scene, but this time with Task Manager opened first so I could watch the Performance tab. As I suspected, once the scene was loaded, all 4 cores went ballistic, hitting 100% and staying there. RAM never went above 9Gb. I checked the Processes and found 4-5 instances of tdlmake.exe bouncing between 10%-25% each. They didn’t stop. I slowly began removing items from the scene until they quit and the CPU dropped to about 3% usage (it looked like it may have been the AoA Ambient Light). I then reloaded the scene and removed the light first. No change. I started removing different items (the last I had put in first), until tdlmake.exe stopped. The results of what I had removed before the CPU dropped to 3% was different. I loaded the scene again and just started to hide items, not delete them. The CPU dropped faster that time, but still rather inconclusive, not supporting the problem being any specific item in the scene.
I can’t say that I’ve really noticed this before, but it definitely has NOT done what it did last night. Daz can be really sluggish at time, but this was a whole different level!! Is this a bug? The idea that Daz could actually fry my CPU is twilight zone material. I’ve never seen my computer have a CPU temp warning like that.
Sounds as if two or more things happened to conflict. TDL make should run multiple instances to convert all of the textures, as you were deleting items you reduced the number of pending textures until the process was complete. It is of course possible that this was an early warning of a hardware issue that just happened to be triggered last night.
I can understand the BSOD and the CPU Temp warning... running the CPU at 100% for almost half an hour could do that (it's only a lowly i5). I think I'm going to keep an eye on this for a while, having Task Manager open when I load a scene, and see if this is normal.
Are there any known bugs at this time related to the tdlmake.exe? I found last night that, once they stopped, everything was fine until I started a render, when the CPU shot back up to 100% on all cores again, but I've generally found that to be normal.
Running at 100% for half an hour should NOT cause a CPU overheating warning...even Pentium 3s could handle that.
And yes, tdlmake and renderdl (the actual name for the 3DL renderer process) will use all available resources...that generally means maxing out all cores.
I was trying to make myself feel better by saying that.
I don't want to think about having to build a new system right now... too broke. haha
Probably just a good cleaning, reseat the cooler with new heatsink compund and you'll be good to go...
Ssshhhhhhh..... I'm trying to convince myself that I have to build a dual octa-core xeon machine!
With 128 GB of RAM, an 8GB Quadro and 3 matching Teslas, and a 500 GB SSD and a couple of 4 TB platter drives for storage?
Well, I already have 32Gb RAM, a 500Gb SSD boot drive and over 4TB of storage...but it's nice to dream big! haha
I want!
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/seagate-unveils-60tb-ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/