Too many installed assets?
plarff
Posts: 269
Hi all
So the more assets I buy and install, and in my case to a NAS device with ssd's loading and saving scenes and searching for assets in DAZ has become increasingly slow. So is there a limit to how many assets one should install, ready to use? I'd hate to install only a few hundred at a time. Currently i have around 2400 installed assets.
Thx.
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Well, I don't believe there is a hard limit and if there is then I haven't hit it yet and have not heard of any of the people who have been around longer mentioning it - so you have a long way to go. This is more a personal question about how long you are prepared to wait, how you search your content, how much storage space you have available etc.
Running it on a NAS does slow things down a little but my personal opinion is that I'd rather have everything installed and available ready to go for when I need it rather than trying to part-install stuff and have to mess about with uninstalling & reinstalling products every time I have a new idea.
Thx for answering. The NAS connects via my 1gb network so that is fast enough i feel. Even with a USB3 connection which is 6TB it should be fast. My reason for a NAS is i have 2 pc's. One my work pc and other the render pc. They both access the NAS device so installing/uninstalling assets then is done on one pc which makes things easier. Also Subset scenes i can access quicker etc.
Opening assets now are 5-7min and saving around 2min. Clearing scenes are around 3-4min per scene etc... Of course im comparing all of this to about a year ago. I have done indexing to the NAS drive to speed things up. I guess it's just something I will have to get use to.
Hmmm, a few of those numbers are a little odd to me. For context I also store my base libraries on a NAS (Synology) so that I can access them on both my Mac (main desktop) and Windows PC (Rendering/Gaming machine) interchangably. Clearing scenes does take a while, but I think that's a Daz thing regardless of where things are stored. If, by assets you are ONLY talking about Genesis figures then those do take a little while but your numbers are probably indicative of duplicate formulas. For other assets (props, materials, envinroments etc) then that is WAY too long, those should load in after a few seconds. Also, I don't think I have had any scenes take more than 10? seconds maybe to save - to be fair it's not something I have ever timed but mainly because it's not taken a noticable amount of time.
EDIT: For reference I just loaded a base G8F into an empty scene and it took 1m 47s. I don't know if there is a good way to count the morphs/figures that Daz would have had to go through to load that but G8F would be the figure I have the most for so no other figure is likely to take longer than that.
I totally with you on what you said. It shouldn't take that long to load most scenes. Loading a G8F without any clothing but with a morph or two, some dont have morphs, takes about the same time as yours.
As for duplicate formulas, I do have a few characters when importing them i get the "duplicate formula" error message.
IT's not a PC issue as its happening on both my PC's. I am not sure if it's a DAZ out of the box thing. It may be in the code of DAZ there isn't anything that tells it to laod or cache certain files after a certain files size ?
When i re install DAZ with default assets, everything of course loads and saves way faster. About 2 yrs back i had the assets which were around 1.9tb onto an internal 2TB HDD (spinning drive). At first it was fairly fast loading then slowed down as I loaded more assets. Then i decided to go NAS route, also spinning drives and last year ive been using the SSD's in the NAS which has increase the access of files and saving of scenes. But now it's getting really slow and its almost as if something drastically changed.
This is all very strange.
Check how much space is available on the drive. D/S does require some empty space to be available to work well.
I have ample space available, out of 4.tb i have 2.37tb available
I could not install my last purchase, my harddrive was full
had to remove some stuff
Lost count of the number of external drives!
Just so you are aware, when you load a Genesis figure Daz will go to the Morph directories for that figure and load ALL of them - includuing all those that are not used. This is just the way that it knows how to immediately adjust the figure when you drag those sliders. Therefore, naturally, the more morphs (including characters and expressions) you make available to Daz (by installing them) then the longer it will take to load that figure.
Then you have duplicate formulas - these are when two assets (usually form two products from different PAs) share the exact same "unique ID". This can happen when PAs choose to name things poorly or when you have two characters with the same name, possibly from different stores. If you are running the normal version this will slow down loading a LOT - and I have meant to heavily emphasise that word in three different ways. If you run the beta then it has less of an effect and also the log actually reports both products that are in conflict which is handy for diagnosis. Regardless of the time to load, the duplicate formulas also mean that one of those products will NOT work. Therefore, if you spot them you should look to report these (if applicable) and fix them yourself (since fixes do not always get made quickly or at all in some instances).
and a major part of the slowdown is not reading from disc but building the links (or checking if there are links to be built) with other properties. This has received some attention recently, see the public (Beta) Build, but that is most dramatically apparent when Duplicate Formulas are present.
The best way is to post your DS log in here, simple and easy. We may find out the culprit. Open DS log, Ctrl + A, delete, save and close. Load a G8.1F Dev Load (and a G8.1M Dev Load if you'd like). Wait till you see the figures in Viewport, then attach the log down below.
Big thank you for the answers Richard and SofaCitizen. Just FYI, i did a few scenes now with a desert asset, pretty simple looking one and I used the Animal Jack little insect in the scene with a high bright skydome. It saves pretty long time (1m30s) and load a little longer time. I am sure few yrs back it wouldve been way faster.
So no morphs used from my part and no duplicate assets in these scenes. Why im still a bit stumped as to why it's so slow. But ill keep the morph and duplicate assets problems in mind.
Thx
Slow saving is another issue. If a 90 seconds' saving happened when you saved the scene file to your NAS, you should then test a saving on a local disk, e.g. C drive.
My assets are saved on the NAS. My actual scenes/duf files saved to a M.2 drive.
Hmm... that's strange. As all the objects in a scene are in RAM, it should be pretty quick when saving the duf file to an M.2, as long as there's no great deal of geoemetry data in the scene (e.g. dForced results on a long timeline...)
I agree... it is strange. My only conclusion is that having many assets installed to whatever location, slows down a lot of things for DAZ. Clearing scenes are also a laborious process it seems for DAZ now.
Nah... the number of intalled assets does not impact file saving but only what's in the scene does. The number of installed characters really impact figure loading / scene opening speed, however, as long as there's no duplicate formulas error and not too many formula links check, the loading / closing could be also fast. I've installed 1.1K characters, nearly 28K character morph files, it only takes appr. 30 seconds to load a G8.1F base figure, with zero error, zero warning.
Not really sure if it will tell us anything but perhaps try saving the same scene both compressed and uncompressed to see if there is a major difference?
Also, do you have any anti-virus installed that maybe is trying to scan the files while you save them?