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Windows reserves some Gfx RAM on any given card, irrespective of it being used for video monitors or just sat there - at least if they are Gforce cards. W10 reserves more RAM.
As a reference for comparison, according to Win 7, my ...\data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female\Morphs folder contains 5.318 files (4.882 .dsf files (morphs or controllers), the rest are HD morphs additional files, morph icons etc.), 77 folders and is around 912 MB big (on disc). Loading time for base G8F is around 17 seconds. Loading time for a character for G8F is around 20 seconds.
According to task manager, just started (empty scene) DS 4.12.0.86 uses around 367 MB of memory. With one base G8F loaded DS uses around 1,23 GB of memory. With second base G8F added, DS uses around 1,86 GB of memory.
So, can anyone who has migrated their runtime from regular HDD over to an SSD help us understand how big a boost that gives? My birthday is coming up and I think I can sneak in a new SSD. But, I was planning on doing something else with that money, originally. So, I really only want to go there if it will make a big enough difference.
I'm sorry about necroposting this, but I also stumbled on this issue. After few years my library grew, I have a lot of morphs and DS came to a crawl. It takes long for DS to start, to add any character and even to delete a scene when starting new one. When I remove my library from DS it's snappy as heck, untill I load it back in.
I tried moving everytihing on one 1 TB SSD but it didn't do anything noticable. I think the main problem isn't loading speed, but DS itself. It needs to load and process all those files and that's where the problem lies. They get loaded from DS faster, but CPU still has to process them all and this is were this starts to limp. My PC isn't the bees knees, but it's not that slow either, it has Ryzen 7 1700 CPU (overclocked to 3.8 GHz) and 16 GB of RAM. So I doubt it's CPU related.
Today I tried making new library, so far I installed G8F, few characters, few morphs packs and it's flying. It takes about 8 seconds for DS to start, about 6 seconds to load G8F to scene. So I dont' think there's some magical way to make it speedy once your library grows, apart from deleting stuff or starting new library with only stuff we use. Or if someone would make an app that would scan saved scene, make inventory of all resources used and create separate, temporary library so we could switch to that limited one while we pose models.
I cases like this I miss poser way of doing morphs, load what you need/want and work with that. Not loading everything that's available wether you use it or not...
To speed up things:
- Setup your library fresh (painfull but pays off)
- If external, use a SSD (I have a 1 TB, 2 TB would be better but currently still not worth the extra money)
- Create two libraries, call one LibraryDefault, one LibraryExtra (you can choose which library to install to in DIM)
- Try to install only what is needed every day in Default (for my i.e. main head/body morphs, Zev0's morphs, some Base characters)
- You don't need to limit yourself on cloth, environments, poses and such as those are only loaded into DAZ if needed. Mind products including character morphs though. Usually those "pressure" morphs for easy fit don't cause much delay but still they add.
- Don't install to much expressions with dials as they also add (and one does not need 100+ smiles usually).
- Install characters or stuff you hardly use to Extra
- Install stuff not used often not at all
- Use ContentWizard to install stuff from 3rd party shops, once you optimize/combine the ZIPs it is way faster; you can also create installers with metadata for a quick install in the future
- Watch out for stuff that extends load times heavily and avoid, only install once needed
- Don't hesitate to uninstall stuff you don't need (with DIM you can always reinstall)
- Use a second external HDD to store packages downloaded with DIM so your SSD does only hold the active library
Once you open a scene with stuff you uninstalled you usually get two error messages. You can install DAZ products shown as missing plus 3rd party stuff (that is listed on the buttom of the error message) directly. If you install everything the 2nd error should not appear or show only stuff still missing. But don't install via Connect but rather DIM not to mix stuff.
Those things worked for me.
I have already installed a lot of stuff again so I recognize load times getting longer again on G2F, G3F, G8F. But they are still under 1 minute and manageable. Once I had everything installed I had load times near > 5 minutes for G8F and even posing became unresponsive.
I hated this issue with G3 so I decided to install a new base G3 m/f in a different data folder and with different user facing files to load them. No vender morphs other than expressions. Any new character I decide I like enough to use on a regular basis gets all its tweaking done on the regular G3 full everything install, then exported as an obj, Morphloadered back to the clean G3, erc frozen and saved at a morph asset for the clean G3. Saves so much time loading characters without a massive kludge of morph dials that I'll never use, after setting up a character, being read. If I decide some new morph is needed I copy it from the 'vendor touched' G3 and move it to my clean install myself.
I've never transistioned to G8... any characters for G8 I decide to buy, I just do the same thing, convert them to morphs for G3.
@Gazzalodi:
Sounds interesting. Could you elaborate a bit more on the process you are using. Might want to adopt ;-)
Fix how? It isn't that something isn't working, it's a matter of managing a large volume of data.
The thing is I would think that this is a problem for Daz. If the more a customer spends on products, the worse the customer's experience using the products becomes, then improving that experience should be a pretty high priority for Daz. It's not for no reason that Daz demos are done on systems with tiny libraries. Showing how long it takes a regular customer to load a character would look really bad. If my early experience using Daz had been like my current experience, I probably would have given up on it back then.
First step is to get a clean base G3 character. I hadn't planned this, so I ended up doing a second install of Daz on another computer then copied the data\daz 3d\genesis3\male (and female) directories over to my existing install, renaming the folders to male-clean and female-clean.
Next copy the existing people\genesis 3\male (and female) dufs. Use a text editor to repoint all the new copy's genesis3\(fe)male calls to genesis3\(fe)male-clean. I also changed up the base shaders and maps... basically edited my version of G3 people to be more usuable for me without having to spend time changing shaders and stuff.
Next just find the things you really need to work on the fly in the normal G3 data directories and copy them over to the G3-clean directories. Things like expressions you might want. Anything that's character creation stuff I leave out completely.
Lastly, for getting morphs between characters, there are lots of well written tutorials on those. To go between generations I use Redz G3 to G8 tutorial and just reverse the models so I'm going from G8 to G3.
I really started doing this a few years ago when I began making my own characters and ended up with a ton of morphs that I crammed into G3s that I never used because they were just bad. So instead of making stuff then digging around to find it and strip it out after the fact. I just found it easier to keep everything both commerical and home made in a bloated copy of G3 and only have the finalized characters in my clean copy.
This. Exactly!
This is a solvable problem. The fact of the matter is that nobody uses more than 1% of their morphs at any one time. At least I don't. I don't need Daz to load morphs for 400 characters so they can be on "hot-standby", ready in case I want to dial in some Victoria8. Daz can load them when I want to use them. I'll wait the extra 20 seconds.
Daz could have 2 modes, the "heavy" mode that loads everything and people expect to wait 10 minutes to load a character and the "light" mode where Daz loads nothing other than what's being used in the scene, so every time you access some morphs, you take a hit waiting for them to load.
While all these workarounds are nice, I keep thinking "don't we have computers to do that?".
in Carrara we have thanks to Alberto, a morph eraser to overcome this exact issue using Genesis+
Carrara saves stuff in a complete file so you get huge files of 2GB or more for these figures if you own lots of morphs
the morph eraser removes all the unused morphs and lets you keep additional selected ones before doing the save resulting in files just a few 100MB in comparison
so
I was thinking maybe someone can create something for DAZ studio, a script that saves the desired scene as a complete standalone maybe renaming all the base content in that scene so it won't reference the Data folder etc creating it's own temporary data folder you can erase if you erase the self contained scene.
I can understand why it has been made the way it is, but planning ahead has been forgotten... It's like Poser Content Management... Works as long as you don't have too much content.
The solution could be one text file which contains the dial labels for installed content and when loading a character, DS would read the dial labels from that file instead of searching through each and every morph-file for the dial label and possible references to other morph-files to read.
The actual morph-files would not be read until the user tries to use one.
Instead of loading everything every time, DAZ Studio should only load things as they are accessed. The morphs should load the first time somebody slides one of the dials. It would create latency the first time somebody slid one of the dials, but the overall amount of time waiting would be decreased.
This is starting to be a real problem as the lifespan of the genesis 8 generation has been significantly longer than the one of previous generations and everything seems to point that genesis 9 is not going to happen anytime soon. The longer the generation lifespan, the bigger the number of morphs/characters and, in consequence, slower, and slower figure load times.
DAZ should give a solution to this. Having the end user juggling with different morphs directories is not the best solution, especially for non expert users. Things can be done on the developer side. Like storing some sort of caché... Marking which morphs to load on the next session directly on DAZ Studio and so on...
That wouldn't work as DS needs to read all of the morphs and set up their links (which is, I think, the tiem consuming bit) so that when morph A iss et it knows what else needs to be set.
That sounds like the ExP system used for Victoria and Michael 4, keeping the list updated was a pain for many users.
It has to load everything to know which sliders to offer, and which sldiers should trigger other sliders.
Merging the new info could be done with a batch file, or the information could be stored in Runtime\Support per product, which would still reduce the overall number of files to be read from 50-100 to just one file per product.
If Daz's database software were multithreaded it could load in all that data more quickly. My cpu has plenty of cores, but only one of them is doing all the work when I load a character.
Thanks for the update!
ExP used a batch file. As far as I know, looking at what is actually active, it's not ehf ile readin per se that is the bottleneck.
I don't believe this is limited by the database, it's setting up and establishing links between all those properties.
I have a folder just with the base G3F / G3M and G8F/G8M.
I unhook my main library when I load my Base and then hook the main library back on.
That way my base characters load fast.
One thing to check is for any unintentionally bloated morphs package.
For instance, I do a lot of custom homemade figures. Once in a great while, I wind up with a massively bloated morph directory taht in turn bogs down the figure when it loads. Here's how to check for this:
1) go to My Library\data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female\Morphs (or on a Mac, My Library/data/DAZ 3D/Genesis 8/Female/Morphs ).
2) start with any custom stuff you made... for instance, I'd go the .\Penguinisto directory in there and look first. Otherwise, well here comes the tedious part...
3) grit your teeth, get a cup of coffee, go through all the directories in there (commercial ones too!), and figure out "size on disk" for each. On Windows, this means opening up "Properties" for each. It helps to start with recent purchases and recently-made custom characters.
You'll see something like this on a good one:
The size you see here is typical - less than a MB or so - sometimes a couple of MBs at the most in exotic cases.
Now for the fun part - if you see that size as something ginormous, say, 2GB (my last bug-generator), then something is heinously wrong, and that directory's contents are your likely culprit. I usually move that whole directory to another place (like "D:\temp\"), make notes as where it was originally, then restart the machine to clear all caches. I then reload DS, and load up the problem-child figure (Base G8, Base G3, whatever.) I move it first just in case, which lets me put it back if the problem didn't go away.
So, if that fixes your issue, yay!
Bad news is, that particular character you just removed is gonna be unusable in DS. If it was a vendor-supplied character, just re-download, re-install, and double-check that the morphs directory isn't bloated.
If it doesn't fix your issue, well... gonna have to try something else.
I imagine that if DS could load all these morph data into memory (RAM) and then access them from there during the rest of the session, instead of from disk (assuming that's what it currently does), it might go a lot faster.
Daz gets you hooked, in the beginning giving you your stash for free or at low prices, but you never suspect the waiting on the proverbial corner that will be your future.
Currently the names and relationships are loaded and retained, the deltas (the changes in vertex position) are not, they are loaded when the moprh is given a non-zero value (and even for HD morphs that is pretty quick most of the time).
I think it is important to stress that the way that morphs are integrated has chnaged over time, Daz is aware of the drawbacks (this isn't the first time the issue has been discussed), and it is something that they review. Any chnages/modifications will probably appear first in the change log http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/change_log .