Tronotrond Posted March 7, 2018 Share Posted March 7, 2018 (edited) Hi all, we recently purchased Houdini at my workplace, and I'm noticing a slight issue when saving my scenes to our network drive. Right now I'm working on a .hip file that's about 20MB. Saving it to any of my local disks is done in seconds. Copying the same file from my local drive to the network only takes a second as well. Saving it to our network drive directly, on the other hand, I can watch the file size slowly grow and it takes about 60 seconds to complete! So I am guessing it has something to do with how Houdini does the file writing. I don't see this happen to any file caches etc. Only when saving the scene file. Unfortunately for us, our data center is not in-house. It's located a few blocks away. So I am guessing it has something to do with how network traffic is routed over - and that a lot of small writes (compared to a large file copy) is slow. Has anyone else experienced this? Are there any workaround. I.e. forcing Houdini to save locally and copy the file? I know 3dsMax and other software normally handles files this way. Edited March 7, 2018 by Tronotrond Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ikoon Posted March 7, 2018 Share Posted March 7, 2018 Hi Trond, maybe this might help you? https://jurajtomori.wordpress.com/2018/01/15/houdini-tip-faster-saving-of-scenes-on-network-drives/ 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lukeiamyourfather Posted March 7, 2018 Share Posted March 7, 2018 (edited) That buffered save variable is nice. I didn't know about that. Besides that it sounds like the network storage is using synchronous writes. There's no reason to use synchronous writes for multimedia and content creation. It only makes sense where a silent failed write would have drastic consequences (like things dealing with money or sales). If the file server can be setup so it does asynchronous writes it should improve performance. The outcome is the same either way just one way tells Houdini to buffer and the other tells the file server to buffer. Edited March 7, 2018 by lukeiamyourfather Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tronotrond Posted March 8, 2018 Author Share Posted March 8, 2018 (edited) 15 hours ago, ikoon said: Hi Trond, maybe this might help you? https://jurajtomori.wordpress.com/2018/01/15/houdini-tip-faster-saving-of-scenes-on-network-drives/ Thank you so much! Worked like a charm. Phew! With autosave on this was driving me mad Luke: Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense, and I'll bring it up to the IT guys. Edited March 8, 2018 by Tronotrond Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ikoon Posted March 8, 2018 Share Posted March 8, 2018 (edited) You are welcome, thanks go to Juraj. More tips and inspiration in his thread: Edited March 8, 2018 by ikoon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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