Thread: Cache problems in 4.1 on OSX 10.4.8

Have some problem with the cache on our Mac Pro. It's so freakin slow! My Dual opteron 275 run eights around the quad mac. =/ Seems like the main problem is with the cache, even thoug it's set to same as in my linux box it dosn't seem to cache stuffs...

I have checked from the terminal so the permissions to /var/tmp is correct and it seems to be. But honestly, it's so bad it's useless to work in. =/ That mac has given us more trouble then joy since day one. =(

A known problem? Any ideas or fixes?

I ran 4.0 on a really beefed up G5, and everything was slow, even navigating the node view with large trees, until I got a fast raid and put the cache dir on the raid. Still not fast maybe. I haven't had the opportunity to work in linux but from what I heard it's much faster!

Now I'm on 4.1 and mac Pro as well. I think the cache is working, you can easily see if shake creates files in that dir! But you are right it doesn't do much good. It sometimes works faster when cachemode is set to none! I only have one hard drive on the mac pro, maybe a raid setup will increase caching speed...

Slightly off topic: I also noticed that shake is not running well if you are rendering on more than one thread. If shake gui is set to work on 4 threads and you start a flipbook on 4 threads everything will be extremly slow. Setting flipbooks to one thread is recommended.

Let's hope for more tips... Im not satisfied either with the performance! :/

/Daniel

Aaah... A fellow swede in distress. Oh my oh my, wonder what apple have done to Shake. =( On the *nix I only use a single 120GB IDE-disk. The Promise sata raid controller didn't work in linux and to make a long story short, promise suxx... But anyways, I don't think it's disk related.

But I will change the cache disk on the mac to our raid just to see what happens. But that is probably a couple of days away.

The funny thing is that one day it all of a sudden was lightning fast, felt as fast as my debian box. But then later that day it was cloged up again. =(

I havnt contacted apple regarding this but I guess I should. But its so much easier to just work on my other computer, with that solution i also avoid geting an heartattack from the osx gui. =)

Originally Posted by danne_n

I ran 4.0 on a really beefed up G5, and everything was slow, even navigating the node view with large trees, until I got a fast raid and put the cache dir on the raid. Still not fast maybe. I haven't had the opportunity to work in linux but from what I heard it's much faster!

Now I'm on 4.1 and mac Pro as well. I think the cache is working, you can easily see if shake creates files in that dir! But you are right it doesn't do much good. It sometimes works faster when cachemode is set to none! I only have one hard drive on the mac pro, maybe a raid setup will increase caching speed...

Slightly off topic: I also noticed that shake is not running well if you are rendering on more than one thread. If shake gui is set to work on 4 threads and you start a flipbook on 4 threads everything will be extremly slow. Setting flipbooks to one thread is recommended.

Let's hope for more tips... Im not satisfied either with the performance! :/

/Daniel

Yo friends! Nice to see you around!
This is a "well known" issue on the macs unfortunately... It's been quite a lot of talk about it in the tech mailinglists for Shake actually. I will at a later time sum it up and post it here for you. When I'm running my MacBook that is (I'm checking my mail on that one). Right now I'm on Linux fortunately.
Will keep you posted...

Hare grymt tills dess Cednert och Daniel!
// David

By the way, I don't think Apple will help you nowadays after the termination of the support & development of Shake... :-/

Alright, some qoutes from the mailinglist (I really hope they don't mind):

"I found that actually spelling out the cache location in a .h file
helped my caching immensely -

diskCache.cacheLocation="/Volumes/Images/Shake/cache";
Jim"

This is interesting as well, especially the global flag getting saved into the scripts. Can it be that Neo?

"I'm with Jim, I put the cache somewhere explicit and it works fine.
Cache nodes I tend to avoid but they seem to work ok for me. But
everything is pointing to a fast raid which helps too.

I have found though that if I crash and get the "Disk cache locked'
thingy, it sometimes sets the global cache mode to read-only which
then gets passed on and saved to each script you open.

Cheers,
Toby Angwin"

Some h-file settings to try... (by Welfy):

I have something like this in my include/startup as a .h file and my
caching seems to work fine

// this plug sets the amount of memory available to nodes when processing.
// it can be changed from the command line with -mem

script.cacheMode = 2;
cache.cacheMemory = 400;

// these plugs control the size and location of the disk cache
// diskCache.cacheMemory controls how much memory is reserved
// for disk buffering

diskCache.cacheLocation = "/local1/Shakecache/cache"; // for IRIX
// diskCache.cacheLocation = "c:/temp/Shake/cache"; // for Windows NT
// diskCache.cacheMaxFile = 4096;
diskCache.cacheMaxFileSize = 4096*4096*4*2;

diskCache.cacheSize = 3000;
diskCache.cacheMemory = 512;

A post by Apple that can be interesting to read:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302395

Please tell how it goes and if any of this was to any help?

A weeeeeee! Thanks David! Will try to look into it during the day. Problem is I'm so hung over so my biggest problem now is how to get some sleep but still make it look like I'm working.

Still find it a bit odd that the cahce problem seems to be mac related. I mean, it would be most logical that shake had least problems on the mac side. I'll report as soon as I know anything new. =)

Edit: ohh btw... What's the story behind this? diskCache.cacheMaxFileSize = 4096*4096*4*2;