saving takes an awful long time

jstilton

hi, 

since recently, when i save a scene, after the saving progress bar is done, the windows spinning circle appears and i can't do anything for a couple of minutes, as if the software is still working on saving my scene. i don't have it always, but usually

(it started to appear right after installing another hard disk, which i'm not even using yet, don't know if that has anything to do with it)

any thoughts?

thanks

Richard Haseltine

It's probably generating the thunbnail png to go with the saved file - you could check that by having a file browser window open to the save location while saving. I have seen other reports of slow saves, but they don't affect everyone.

areg5

jstilton said:

hi, 

since recently, when i save a scene, after the saving progress bar is done, the windows spinning circle appears and i can't do anything for a couple of minutes, as if the software is still working on saving my scene. i don't have it always, but usually

(it started to appear right after installing another hard disk, which i'm not even using yet, don't know if that has anything to do with it)

any thoughts?

thanks

I fixed my slow saving/loading problem by loading a scene, saving it as a subset, opening the subset (not merging it but opening it like you would open a scene) and then saving as a scene.

Tobor

The length of time for saving a file depends on what's in the file. I've found non-Genesis assets that store their morph data in the file, such as V4 or M4, to take a lot longer to save. These files can be significantly larger, 50+ megabytes in some cases.

During saving D|S creates a temp file of your latest version, and as soon as that is complete, it's swapped with the previous file, and the thumbnail is created. This process takes less than a second.

 

mikael-aronsson

If it started when you installed the second disk something maybe wrong, you do mean a real HDD, not external HDD (USB or whatever) ?.

If you use Windows, open up task manager and switch to the performance tab and see if it writes a lot to any disk when this happen, make sure you have not changed anything so you have any network drives mapped that does not exist or something so that there is some timeout that kicks in, is it only with DS, you don't have any another applications that are slow to save or something ?

 

jstilton

thanks all

so something i found out is that when i save over an existing scene, the lag doesn't occur. it's only when i "save as" (a new file). also it's clearly something that happens after the saving process itself (like i said the progress bar completes and it looks like it's done, but then the spinning circle comes up). this seems to indicate somethign in the direction of what richard is suggestion (thumbnail creation, or something else). 

mikael, yes, it's a real internal hard disk. i haven't been using it yet, though since it was installed i know that the volume numbers (E:, D:...) changed. I have watched the performance manager during saving and haven't seen anything unusual. also i haven't noticed anything else that is slow. 

hope to solve this, cause having to wait for a couple of minutes after each new save is really annoying

 

jstilton

so, in addittion to my previous comment, i saw that task manager (performance tab) shows me that daz is actually "not responding" after saving a new scene (for a couple of minutes, while the circle spins)

 

Richard Haseltine

That means that whatever it is doing isn't part of the main event handling loop.

Tobor

You can determine if there's an issue with file emplacement and/or thumbnail by having your Scene folder open. Order it by Date, and watch the process. You'll see a tmp file during the same, and the exchange with the previous version should be very quick. Same with the thumbnail. If these aren't occuring, then you might have a hardware issue causing a slowdown. Usually, though, there will be a slowness to everything, not just D|S.

jstilton

so i noticed that i only have this problem when i save to my original or new hard disk, but NOT when i save to an external hard disk. does this shed any light on the problem?

i haven't seen anything else slowing down

Richard Haseltine

I suppose the location you are saving to isn't in a folder also set as a render library?

jstilton

it's a directory inside the my daz 3D library directory. is that not ok?

Richard Haseltine

Probably OK, but check to make sure it isn't also listed as a render directory - Render Directory Manager from the option menu for the Render Library pane (the lined button in the top corner, or right-click the tab).

jstilton

just checked, it's not listed there...

Richard Haseltine

OK, good - it just occurred to me that there was a small chance the code that generates thumbnails for images was conmflciting with the code that genrates thumbnails for files, though it seemed very unlikely

jstilton

thanks. any other thoughts?

AlienRenders

Are you using any tool that creates morphs such as Fit Control. That one is notorious for slownig down saves because it'll creates tons of morphs for each clothing item fitted on your character and since these are dynamically created, they must be saved with your scene file. So check the size of your scene file. It's it under a few MB or is it 50MB+ ?

Tobor

AlienRenders said:

Are you using any tool that creates morphs such as Fit Control. That one is notorious for slownig down saves because it'll creates tons of morphs for each clothing item fitted on your character 

Yep! Since it doesn't appear that you can selectively unload the morphs for certain clothes, what I end up doing is adding only the item(s) that need fitting (poorly designed shoes are often helped), then applying Fit Control, and finally adding the other clothing items. If there's a way to disable/unload Fit Control on a per-item basis, I haven't found it.

jstilton

AlienRenders said:

Are you using any tool that creates morphs such as Fit Control. That one is notorious for slownig down saves because it'll creates tons of morphs for each clothing item fitted on your character and since these are dynamically created, they must be saved with your scene file. So check the size of your scene file. It's it under a few MB or is it 50MB+ ?

thanks, but no, i don't use it, and it doesn't have anything to do with the scene. even when i make a very basic scene with just one object in it, it happens...

Tobor

jstilton said:

even when i make a very basic scene with just one object in it, it happens...

I guess it would depend on what this object is, but if it's something really simple, like a primitive with basic shading, then I'd say there's a hardware issue. I guess the first thing I'd do, if you have a second physical hard drive (not just a partition on the same drive) is see if changing your library locations has any affect. I think this is something you entertained with Richard back on the 10th.

jstilton

an update on this, as i think i found it, thanks to a comment from richard, who asked:

I suppose the location you are saving to isn't in a folder also set as a render library?

i just had the problem again, and indeed i recently had added the folder i'm saving in as a library of my scenes, to get a thumbnail overview of my scenes within studio. i removed that library, and now it seems to work again! thanks!