VDB volumes super slow to start rendering (data on network share) #102990
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Reference: blender/blender#102990
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System Information
Operating system: Linux-5.15.0-56-generic-x86_64-with-glibc2.35 64 Bits
Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super/PCIe/SSE2 NVIDIA Corporation 4.5.0 NVIDIA 525.60.13
Blender Version
Broken: version: 3.5.0 Alpha, branch: master, commit date: 2022-12-07 08:40, hash:
cc1ba74ce2Short description of error
I'm currently working on a project that involves some VDB volumes coming from Houdini. Nothing too fancy, in the end it's just some VDBs containing density.
Except for having to set some volumes to display only coarse boxes (because otherwise the viewport would become a bit slow), Blender deals with it like a champ. Viewport render interactivity is brilliant, rendering final frames on a local machine (laptop with RTX2070 Super) is fine.
After work I sent a job to the farm (24 nodes, all with 32GB RAM / RTX 3070s) for an overnight render, I was shocked to see ~1,5h render times per frame the next day!
My laptop finished a final frame in ~20 minutes, so I was expecting something like 10 to 15 minutes, not 90!
After investigation I found that the initialization phase was grotesquely long. When I logged into a render client and tried to render locally I noticed that a viewport render of this scene would hang at "Updating Mesh" phase for a very long time (see log below).
After I copied the blend file and the VDBs to the local drive, it started rendering instantly.
You might suspect it's a slow server (Windows Server with smb share, 10GBit LAN) but the blend file itself opens in a few seconds, including the viewport display of the VDBs. So they're quick to load. To me it seems like Blender is receiving lots of tiny data blocks from the VDBs after you start a viewport or final render which causes the initialization phase to take such a long time.
I also tried it on another network / server -> same result. Something is fishy here.
As I said, the VDBs are what I would call "small" to "medium" size. The attached one takes ~15 Minutes to initialize when the data comes from the server while it starts in a fraction of a second when started locally:
Exact steps for others to reproduce the error
BUG_Volume_Slow_v01.blend.zip
Just look at the log file and notice the loooong pauses during "Updating Mesh" and "Copying Mesh to Device" phases. The render time afterwards is more than OK:
Added subscriber: @SteffenD
Added subscriber: @brecht
Does
export OPENVDB_DISABLE_DELAYED_LOAD=1help?I know there were some inefficiences with network drives in OpenVDB at some point, not sure if they should have been fixed by now or not.
Added subscriber: @PratikPB2123
Thanks @brecht for the quick reply and the explanation. Setting OPENVDB_DISABLE_DELAYED_LOAD=1 indeed helps A LOT! Rendering now starts in a millisecond.
I was only able to test this on Windows client <> Windows server. I wonder if Linux behaves the same.
This issue was referenced by
d2050c7c36This issue was referenced by
e4f9c50928Changed status from 'Needs Triage' to: 'Resolved'
Added subscriber: @Beinaido
Hi all, would you mind briefly sharing the steps on how to set this setting "OPENVDB_DISABLE_DELAYED_LOAD=1"?
Thanks in advance!
The issue should be fixed in 3.3 LTS and daily 3.5 builds, so that's easiest if you can use those.
To learn how to set environment variables, it depends on the operating system and you can find tutorials about that.
Note that setting this globally will also affect other applications using OpenVDB.
Hi Brecht, thank you very much for replying so quickly. Will look into this. Cheers!