SLOW Library Refresh Rates - What I Discovered
DarkElf
Posts: 518
Hello All.
For a very long time I was expeiencing VERY SLOW content library refresh rates. I believe I posted here asking for help. Either most people don't have this problem or most post was not seen by anyone who had any suggestions to offer.
So, since I never seem to have any help to offer others but have been the recipient of help here a number of times I thought I might post this in the hope that it might either help some one out there who is having this problem or it might spur a discussion amongst the more knowledgable members about this subject and thus shed more light on this issue.
Prior to my recent remedy my system specs were: ASUS ROG G752VY-DH72 17-Inch Gaming Laptop, Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M 4 GB VRAM, 32 GB DDR4, 1 TB, 256 GB NVMe SSD . I had my content library on my 1 TB 7200 RPM spinning disk secondary hard drive. It ran great but had a few DS related problems the most annoying of which was the content libray disappearing and taking a LONG time to reappear after ANY render. I sometimes had to wait up to 5 minutes for my content library to show up again!
The first thing I tried was upping my RAM. I maxxed my system out to 64 GB - up from 32 GB. My thought was that more RAM would give DS more temporary memory to store its active files in and not have to refresh as much. But that had no affect on my disappearing library problem.
So, more recently I purchased a new 2 TB solid state drive and transferred my entire content library to that. Bingo! I now have to wait extended periods to see my content library after a render or test render. So, I'm assuming the problem had to do with the combination of the VAST size of my content library and the fact that it was stored on an old style spinning disk hard drive.
I hope this information I have left is helpful to some one out there.
If anyone has anything to add or contribute I would be glad to hear from you.
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Comments
I'm a Mac user, my content library disappears every now and then, but it's not related to rendering, can't put my finger on it really, it seems totally random. When it happens I can see the folder names but not the content, my fix is to rightclick and choose browse to folder location, the content always comes back instantly.
ETA: Refreshing doesn't work at all.
Thanks for the reply Sven! That is good information. I wish I had thought of that when I had the problem. I used to try right clicking and choosing refresh but it didn't seem to help. I never thought to try the file location. Good idea.
I get the issue sometimes when I plug in too many peripherals as my library is on an external drive
it seems my PC can only cope with two USB drives easily, any more and other things like webcams, midi keyboard etc things start dropping.
It has been an issue for the 7 years I have had this machine even with a new mobo and PSU
I've noticed that if I just hover the mouse pointer over the panel that displays the icons they show up immediately (Windows).
For a while that seemed to be the case for me but it actually seemed - for me at least - it all depended on how long I waited before I did that. Never did completely resolve what was really going on. I'm actually not really certain why just putting my content library onto an SSD made all the difference. It must have something to do with access speeds.
Sounds like the extra peripherals tax your CPUs or RAM too much or something.
Could be weak sectors on HDD - they can be very slow to read/write, like 1-2 MB/s in some cases.
Could you have a drive that powered down due to drive inactivity? Not sure if that would cause this or not.
Hmmm. Good question. Not sure but it sounds logical. But in my case even if I did a short render I had trouble getting my content library back some times.
I have my library on an external 8TB hard drive and starting up DIM and switching categories in the smart pane or content pane takes forever... But I have so much content, I don't want it all to take up room on my computer hard drive.
Another weird glitch on my Windows laptop, the UI screws up in DS and I lose the scrolling bar in the smart content pane so I have to keep switching from oldest to newest to see content on the bottom and can't see content in the middle at all. Sometimes all the content disappears completely and I click CMS and nothing happens. Have to restart. Not sure if anyone else has this problem. It says I can work offline, but how can I when all my content that's on my external hard drive is not accessible?
OH MAN Wonderland! I thought MY issues were annoying! I feel for you. You have it worse than I did. It sounds like what the Silver Dolphin says below just might be the issue. I am not software savy enough to say one way or the other. Well, if it is a program issue, hopefully DAZ3D will resolve it eventually.
@DarkElf "So, I'm assuming the problem had to do with the combination of the VAST size of my content library and the fact that it was stored on an old style spinning disk hard drive."
What's "vast"? I have 780Gb of installed content on an external USB drive and don't get the slowdown you report.
Yup. You've got me beat. My Library is only 640 GB. That's just the DS library. Then I have a lot of stored zipped files of content from Rendo and rendered pics and other stuff.
Yeah, as I indicated, I have no idea what was causing the problem. All I know is it stopped when I move over to the SSD.
Update: I have discovered that the disappearing library after a render, test render or NVIDIA view still persists. BUT, if I point at where an item icon SHOULD be, the library instantly refreshes and I get it back. I think this IS a CMS issue. Perhaps it will be fixed on the next upgrade? We shall see.
Yes that happens to me too on my laptop. The library disappears and usually clicking CMS works but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I have close and reopen DS. And sometimes other weird things happen like the scroll bars disappear in the libraries. And just opening the pane for a product can take a while and starting DIM can take up to 15 minutes! I have everything stored on an 8TB hard drive with a ton of content, not sure if that's the problem.
I have my Daz CMS and DSON caches on a ramdrive. I think it helps on the 'refresh rate' for the library display. Also, my Daz library is on a striped RAID SSD array (with an external HDD backup that I update periodically). I still experience lagging, but not as much as I used to. How much of that I can associate with the RAID Array and Ramdrive I can't really quantify, but every second or two I can shave here and there is a good thing...
Is the Content Library connected to the CMS at all - isn't the CMS for Smart Content and Connect only? I mean, you can install content manually in the Content Library, so if the CMS is connected it would be supposed to read the library to register new stuff all the time, and if something is wrongly installed then how does it handle it?
You poor thing. You have it worse than I ever did. But with me, now that I have everything on SSDs I get my library back very quickly when I point to the empty space where items SHOULD be showing. Perhaps you should consider putting your primary content on and SSD?
I actually not certain. I was baing this guess upon another commentsor's assesment. Don't know for sure really.