UI slowdown in Windows

[Esteban Covo]

Hi,

I talked about this over at Discord where Murray was very helpful as always, but I tought about posting it here as it seems a bit cleaner ( and indexable ).
We are starting production on our first animated feature film and the the tech team is hard at work implementing a pipeline around Gaffer/Arnold.
As much as we would like to switch the pipeline to Linux it seems unfeasable for this production so wea are stuck with windows for the time being.

Right now a problem we are having is the UI slows down quite a bit over time, the only way we've found to fix it is closing every opened instance of Gaffer and opening them right back.

Murray told me this was a problem with PySide6 in Linux but it is fixed now, I was wandering what can we do to help identify the issue in windows or if there is any report of anyone else having the same Issue ( we've tested over a number of hardware now ).

We'll appreciate any guidance on steps to debug on our end to get to the issue.

[John Haddon]

Hi Esteban,

I think the most useful thing you could do would be to profile Gaffer when it is in a slow state. That might give us some hints as to where the problem lies. You can get a Python-level profile easily by running `gaffer -profileFileName myProfile`, and you could send that file to us. Even more valuable would be a C++-level profile, which you'd need a custom tool for - there is a bit of an overview of Microsoft's options at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/performance/choose-between-tools, but others are available.

I think a new Qt patch release is due out tomorrow (they come out a year after the commercial ones), so I'll check that to see if anything seems relevant - we should probably upgrade anyway. I'll also ping Eric to see if he has any thoughts, since he's on Windows daily (the rest of us are on Linux).

Cheers...

John

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[Esteban Covo]

Hi John,

Thank you so much for the reply, yesterday we had a meeting and decided to go the extra distance and switch the production to Linux since Gaffer stability is going to be the most important thing and everything else should run fine.

We'll keep testing in windows ( we think it might have to do with windows defender and credentials but who knows ), if the problem persists we'll do a python level profile ( we can try to do a C++ Level profile but have never done it before ).
Still would be great to know if there are other users experiencing the same thing :)

[John Haddon]

There's definitely something to be said for being on Linux - our day jobs are all a Linux studios, so that's what gets the most attention. But we are keen to get this problem addressed on Windows. Eric has managed to reproduce something on his machine, and is investigating further..

Cheers...

John

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[Esteban Covo]

Yes, we figured as much, right now we are scrambling to get the whole pipeline adapted to Linux but everything is coming along nicely.
Good thing Eric was able to replicate, we were starting to think we were the only ones :)
we'll do a python profile in windows as soon as we get the pipeline running in Linux
Thank you for the help.

[eric...@gmail.com]

I may have found a solution! I was able to recreate the slowdown of menus after many viewer updates. The simplest case is to have a catalog (no renders running, just a catalog with at least two images) and arrow key up / down to toggle between two images. After maybe 30 seconds of this, the menus will slow down a lot.

A solution that worked for me is to disable "Threaded Optimization" in the Nvidia control panel. If you open up that panel, go to "3D Settings -> Manage 3D Settings" and in the main window panel, scroll down to "Threaded Optimization". Turning that off, press apply and restart Gaffer. That fixes the menu slowdown for me.

Does that offer any improvement?

:fingers crossed emoji:

- Eric

[Esteban Covo]

Awsome!, Thank you Eric, we'll try it out next week and get back to you