No Smart Content gallery after deleting temporary files

janus22

Greetings altogether,

yeaah. After Daz 3D was running into performance issues after a certain time of having it open, I was thinking of a memory leak of some kind, because closing and opening the program again fixed it for the moment, but it started all too early to become unperformant again... so as annoyes as I was to break my workflow again, I came to the glorious idea to delete temporary files.... Just to find out a moment later that all smart content stuff has gone to hell and the entire CMS isn't working anymore.

When hitting Login, it returns a "No Database found" message, saying "a database connection could not be established", mentioning an issue with "PostgreSQL" ect, you probably know what kinda message I mean. If not, I'll gladly upload a screenshot, ofc.

Anyways, I was already trying to "Export User Data" + "Reset Database" under the Content Database Maintenance, and also Re-Import Metadata, but to no avail so far...
The "Start CMS" button casts a short loading moment and then returns without anything being different.

I'm rly a bit desperate meanwhile, as I've only started using Daz 3D this year and invested a lot of time and money to get my stuff together. Also I have content from other 3D sites added to it, which is ofc also gone for the smart content thingy. When looking into the normal Content Library, ofc all is there still.

Please, someone there to tell me I can just return back to normal workflow, without having lost something important here?

Thanks in advance..!

Richard Haseltine

How did you delete the temporary files?

janus22

Oh, I can be more precise on that, thanks for jumping in, Richard:

- I hit the "Clear..."-button in the Preferences' "Temporary Files" section. Which was where the hell-cycle began. No doubt it was my mistake in first place even hitting that button, as I wasn't expecting it to be affecting more than some temporary scene files. There rly should be an extra warning following this button that this is probably messing up database!

Anyways: I posted this thread at about 4.30pm and it seemingly wouldn't show up even an hour later, so I was convinced this post would (for whatever reason nowadays) never show up and I'm on my own, leading to experiments that might seem funny for an expert/insider. But they're not if you don't know the program's hick-ups or no-do's. The culprit: After investing half the work day fixing this stupid error, I seemingly.. found a way to eventually beat this crap. As it's still early in testing this while writing this, I am careful about calling it "done", but atm I found no further problems of connecting again...

 

To make it comprehendible and maybe help others in my situation, I took another second today (workflow is gone anyway for this day) to list the road so far, aka "I tried a lot of approaches to fix this mess":

• Un-installed PSQL and Re-Installed Daz > Same issue still
• When trying to re-install PostgrSQL, (furthermore called "PSQL") through the IM, there was an incredible odd issue, showing the program in the IM as having a disk space of "-1 bytes", leading to it getting stuck in the re-install process forever. Getting frustrated I first needed to find out where the PSQL is located eventually and then ventured into the folder to delete the whole PSQL stuff existing there. Re-installed it again > and still same issue. 
• Re-installed the entire IM and even repeated the above steps: > Issue still there
• Growing real desperate and out of options, I again started all over and changed even things that worked perfectly before:
  • I did change the PostgrSQL's Port from "17237" to "17236" in the "Preferences" window under "CMS Settings" tab.
  • Then did a CMS folder "wipe" (renaming the suspiciously part-empty "ContentCluster" folder) manually and
  • deleted the whole PSQL folder structure as well, while
  • ordering in the Install Manager's "Installed" tab to delete PSQL from the list in order to
  • re-install it again through the "default install sets" button, like before.
  • It downloaded, and this time installed properly, so taking its fair amount of 2 minutes to progress the bar properly, which seemed like being skipped before, resulting in the malfunctional "-1byte" install. Checked it in the other tab and it now reads 65.6MB as it should and was before.
  • This time, when launching Daz 3D, it wasn't popping the message telling me the PSQL connection is dysfunctional and after confirming my account login credentials like on first launch, it connected and listed the smart content stuff as is fraggin should be. 

 

- Only two things that are different after that halfway-catastrophe today are:

1. Favourites ofc are gone and need to be reassigned and
2. when clicking on the "All Files" section of the Smart Content viewer, I have some empty files floating around, having no icon nor name and apparently pointing to no directory.
   • Solution-hint: right-clicking on it and hitting "Explore Product" at least tells you what asset it belongs to, so you can re-import it)

 

So... hopefully this is it now and I am not forced back to tell otherwise. For now thank you very much for offering an ear and your knowledge, Richard. I very much appreciate the gesture!

Happy posing and creating!

Richard Haseltine

Clearing temp fiels should empty whatever directory is set as the temp folder (by default %appdata%/DAZ 3D/Studio4/temp/). That certainly shouldn't touch anything related to the databse.

barbult

I just cleared my temp files via the Daz Studio Preferences dialog, and nothing bad happened at all. So there doesn't seem to be a universal software bug related to that action.

janus22

Hah, thank you, Richard. That was exactly what I hoped for, before hitting the clear-button.

Thus imagine how annoyed it was then, when finding out that it somehow hollowed out my PSQL connection for some reason. As this was the only factor I did differently this day, your guess is as good as mine. ;) 

 

And thanks also for counter-checking it, Barbult, ;) even if it's a bit disappointing to find out it's not that easy reproducable. Means it's probably not getting fixed that soon. Anyhow this error seems to have been taking its turns meanwhile around quite some users, so there's a mysterious combo of circumstances necessary to mess that up. Yet I'm never gonna hit that clear button again, you can bet.