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General performance optimizations?

Permanently deleted user

July 28, 2015 16:26

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Hi!

I'm in the process of wrapping up the pipeline that evolved here over a 1 1/2 year project and I'd like to have something for the next project that is solid and has a good performance. Making our customizations a solid code base I can do, but I'm wondering if there's any optimization techniques, tips, tricks... that people feel like sharing.

In our current pipeline, there's this general sluggishness of the whole 'Shotgun Experience'. Every little thing needs a few extra seconds to complete and it seems like every button, every menu, every interaction has an artifical delay build into it.
Is it just because the way shotgun toolkit needs to access its servers for everything (we can has local caching, pls?)? Is it because we have a couple hundred shots, assorted assets and resulting from this, a lot of tasks in shotgun (seems not that much considering what a full CG project would be like)? Did our context configs (shot_step.yml, ... those kind of files) and all our customizations grow too complex over the course of the project (it's not really all that much code)? Oh, also, we're running everything on windows, it seems like that makes the performance worse in all aspects as well... Anyone have a comparison between shotgun toolkit on windows vs linux?

Cheers,

Sebastian H

 

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5 comments

• 0
  
  Alan Dann July 28, 2015 18:59

  Hi Sebastian,

  Just noticed nobody has replied to this thread so I thought I'd add a couple of thoughts.

  Yes, Toolkit does need to connect to the Shotgun servers a lot so this can have a significant impact on the responsiveness, especially if you don't have a great connection to the server!  We have started work to mitigate this in the new iterations of the apps by using the new Shotgun Model caching introduced in the Shotgun Utilities Framework - the Loader is the first app that has benefited from this and others will follow (I'm currently using this in the new iteration of the File Manager to improve pulling the lists of tasks, publishes, etc. from Shotgun) so hopefully this will begin to improve things.

  There are also a few areas in Toolkit that we know feel particularly sluggish and that we hope to also address:

  • Folder Creation - this can be quite slow and as it runs as part of launching an application from Shotgun or the Desktop App, it can make the point of entry for users feel really slow!  We know we need to improve this and it is on our radar!
  • Shotgun Desktop App - we are aware that some clients experience a delay when switching between projects and again when launching from the Desktop App.  We are looking into this atm to try and isolate what's going on.
  • Windows - We have seen poor performance for some Windows users where their Toolkit config & install are stored on a slow network share.  We do have a branch of core that helps mitigate this slightly by moving the python code into a single zip file which significantly reduces the number of files that need to be opened - this should make it into the main branch soon...  We are also making good progress with allowing the install and config to be local per-user by using the Shotgun Desktop App to manage distribution - ultimately this will probably be the best solution.

  It's also in our plans to add better instrumentation and logging to help diagnose performance bottlenecks and areas that could be improved.  In the mean time though, if there are specific points of slowdown that anyone is seeing then we would be more than happy to investigate.

  Thanks

  Alan

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  Benoit Leveau July 28, 2015 18:59

  Hi Alan,

  Any idea when the new version of the File Manager app will be out? We have a show where artists can't use it because there's too many shots for the app to cope with...

  Cheers,

  Benoit

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  Alan Dann July 28, 2015 18:59

  Hi Benoit,

  It's currently in development but should be available early next year.  Out of interest, is the current app just very, very slow or does it crash/fall over?

  Thanks

  Alan

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  Benoit Leveau July 28, 2015 18:59

  Hi,

  This is good news!

  It is very very slow, I just tried and it took more than 10 minutes to display the list of shots in the "Pick a Work Area". It says "Showing 75 of 3946 items" at the top but it looks like it's loading all of them before displaying them.

  I've seen it failed a couple of times as well after a few minutes, but not sure if it was a server error or a timeout...

  Benoit

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  Alan Dann July 28, 2015 18:59

  Wow, that is bad!  

  Ok, we will get the new version out as soon as possible and let you know when it's available.

  Thanks

  Alan