Adrian Posted January 2, 2016 Share Posted January 2, 2016 (edited) Hello, I'm having trouble with Houdini 15 on my Xubuntu machine. At first I thought it was a problem with the X-Server, because open windows wouldn't redraw themselves and I couldn't open any new ones, but then I realized that setting the mantra threads to 1 seemed to alleviate the problem (8, 7, 6, were all equally bad). It appears that spawned mantra instances kept rendering in the background, which I failed to notice from the unresponsive UI. So now my guess is that mantra hijacks too many system resources, completely stalling the Desktop environment. This applies to the Houdini UI itself too by the way - a few seconds into a preview render, the image doesn't update any more. The same with MPlay when doing an interactive render. I tried starting up Houdini with a "niceness" value of 19 and an mantra instances inherit that, but it doesn't make one bit of difference. I have a fairly beefy system, though with a consumer graphics card (Nvidia GeForce GTX 970). Nvidia drivers are the most recent ones available in the regular Ubuntu repository, i.e. 352. Do you guys have any suggestions on what might alleviate the issue, or maybe have experienced it yourself? I vaguely recall that setting priority low worked for me in the past, but that was back on Windows I think. Thanks. Edited January 2, 2016 by Adrian Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hamp Posted January 2, 2016 Share Posted January 2, 2016 Hmm, could it be XFCE? I'm running H15 on Centos 7.2 on Cinnamon with the same card and drivers and never had to adjust anything. I can even render with mantra using all cores and the UI never becomes unresponsive. It's been worse for me in Windows though. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adrian Posted January 2, 2016 Author Share Posted January 2, 2016 (edited) I had the same issue while briefly test-driving GNOME3, so I think the problem is not XFCE specific, and H14 worked fine as I recall. The XOrg logs show no problems either. One of the first things I did was to disable XFCE's compositor, but again no difference. I can't think of what to do next to narrow down the source of the problem. I'd rather not try newer graphics drivers, as that might introduce problems of its own. UPDATE: It appears to work now. Sorry, this is a little embarrassing, but I just fired up my workstation again to investigate further and the problem appears to have vanished entirely. As i write this, I'm doing a heavy render using all threads, without even touching process priority, and experience no lag at all. The preview render is completely responsive, it's like night and day. So unless it comes back (knock on wood), don't waste your time and consider my thread void. Bad start into the new year averted Edited January 2, 2016 by Adrian 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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