Hard Drive Space Used by Daz Studio
marcelle19
Posts: 171
It seems every time I do any rendering, my main drive gets cluttered up. So far, I've been able to clean stuff up with disk cleanup, but why does Daz Studio store so many files from doing renders? I don't mean the renders themselves - I have those on a different drive already.
I would really appreciate it if someone could tell me where all these Daz Studio files generated from the rendering are located so I can clean them out. They are obviously not integral to the operation of Daz Studio.
Thank you very much for your help and time.
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Edit>Preferences (Daz Studio>Preferencs for a Mac) will let you change the location of the Temp folder.
Bit of an old thread, but the closest to something I'm experiencing too.
When rendering with Studio, my system drive fills up. I've both Studio and my content libraries stored on non-system drives, so it must be something to do with temp files too. I've not been doing any heavy rendering recently - single characters and a couple of light boards - but as an example, last night, Studio ate up 17GB of system drive space after 4 renders. I find that a staggering amount. I run a small, SSD system drive, which means my system all but shuts down when Studio is utilising that much space.
There are two ways I can sort it - do a drive clean-up of temp files with Studio running or restart Studio. The used space returns in those scenarios. I would've thought that Studio would release any system resources it used when a render completes and/or I start a new one. Like Marcelle, I don't think it has anything to do with the temp folder set in Studio itself.
I thought it may be something to do with system memory caching, but then again I've 32GB RAM and the renders I've been doing are relatively light. If I leave my hard drive to fill up, I'll eventually get the 'renderer is already in use' message and Studio will need a restart.
I guess I'm wondering whether this is normal behaviour or whether there's an error in Studio that means it's only releasing resources when on exit and not at the end of each render. It's very frustrating and renders actually get slower the longer I keep Studio open. Renders are happening on the GPU too. IIRC, modern GPU drivers on Windows create a memory pool on the hard drive as well as on the GPU, so I wonder if there's an issue freeing those after renders. I've a RTX 3060ti 12GB.
Anyway, I'll continue troubleshooting, but I thought I'd post here too in case anyone has pointers on things to try. I may go the nuclear option soon and delete everything Daz related and build up my library again - the structure imposed by Connect is a mess anyway, so I was already planning to move to manual installs for my own sanity. I've so many doubles in my library, as well as products installed across a few different root folders in smart content. Plus it's incredibly difficult to compare, for example, skins when they're packaged under individual characters and not in one central place. But that's a different issue.
Are you shutting down your computer straight after closing Daz Studio? If you check out the Task Manager after closing Daz Studio you will notice that it hangs around for a while after looking like it's closed. I believe part of what it's doing here is doing a little housekeeping, so cleaning up the temp folder is probably part of that. 17GB does indeed seem pretty extreme, but perhaps if you try closing Daz Studio and then leaving your computer alone for a while it will go through and clean up some of that space?
If not, see if you can find where exactly that 17GB is coming from.
This part is definitely true and frequently mentioned. Any rendering and iray preview will seemingly leave little traces behind and so if you find your renders are dropping to CPU when you think they shouldn't then restarting Daz Studio might fix that.
If you are using Daz Connect (logged into Daz within Daz Studio) in addition to using DIM or Daz Central then you will absolutely have duplicate products installed. If you do consciously want to use Daz Connect to install your content then you should not use either DIM or Daz Central - or probably install Daz Store stuff manually since Connect will probably override that. If you do not want to use Daz Connect then you should logout of your account in Daz Studio, uninstall everything that Daz Connect has installed and reinstall it with DIM or Central (or manually if you prefer).
Thanks for the pointers! I've been using Connect and Central, and possibly DIM on occasion too. Really need to get myself more organised and disciplined on that. Think I'll go the manual route because none of the offered install managers organise things to my liking, plus it'd be nice to stop things like 3Delight materials ended up installed at all. My shaders folder is particularly messy - things installed all over the place but then also some categories that are big dumps of 100's of files that are difficult to browse if you don't know what you're looking for.
Shutting Studio down definitely frees the system hard drive files almost instantly, so I guess I should focus on what those files are like you suggested. There may be something odd in my setup that's causing that.
I don't suppose you know where the PostgreSQL DB is stored? Wondering whether that adheres to the library drive or it's on the system drive (hopefullly with an option to store it elsewhere? Although that shouldn't have anything to do with the 17GB or even be anywhere near that size). I wonder if there's any way I can load that up in a viewer to get a look at the DB structure. More for my own curiosity and, if I'm starting from scratch, to ensure whatever I end up doing plays nicely with it.
Central is effectively a fancy wrapper for DIM so as far as I am aware those two can probably be used together although it probably still would make sense to pick one. Connect does things very different tho and uses a separate library configuration and structure. It also take precedence over products installed by other means which does trip up many users.
Well, the folder structure for products does have some rules but mainly is a set of recommendations. Plus some products are packaged incorrectly. Thus, if you do use "Content Library" more often than "Smart Content" then you will unfortuntely have several frustrations and finding things could sometimes be tricky. Manual installations would give you some control over that - although you would have to be careful of folders that cannot be changed (data & runtime) - with the downside being that it will take a lot more time to install each product. If you go that route it might be wise to seek out some advice from other users who do that.
If you go to Edit->Preferences->CMS Settings it will show you where the PostgreSQL files are stored. By default it would be stored on your system drive - I don't remember the installer prompting for an install location. However, this is not liked to the library locations in any way - it's a separate setting. You might have some luck moving it elsewhere although I have read some posts from people that had trouble with that so proceed with caution if you try.
For some context, my CMS cluster folder is 2GB so it does take up a bit of space but not 17GB worth.
It is possible to connect directly to the database as I do that for a few reasons. However, if you do start poking about please note that this should also only be done at your own risk.
Another thing to note is that if you go down the route of installing your products manually then you will have to populate the CMS manually also. I think most people who manually install don't tend to use Smart Content and so that is not an issue for them.