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AOI slow to open files

Posted by nophead 
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nophead
AOI slow to open files
June 28, 2007 01:27PM
AOI takes nearly 2 minutes to open clamp.aoi on my system which is an Athlon XP2800.
During this time the application does not respond and there is no progress bar. This seems ridiculous for such a simple model. Is this typical or is there something peculiar to my installation?

[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]
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Forrest Higgs
Re: AOI slow to open files
June 28, 2007 01:54PM
Sounds like the clamp is a big nasty boolean object. They tend to take a long time to load.
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nophead
Re: AOI slow to open files
June 28, 2007 02:40PM
It's only a rectangular block with about a dozen objects subtracted from it, cylinders and blocks. I wouldn't have thought that was "big and nasty" but I have no experience of 3D cad. It must be hard to burn up 2 minutes of CPU time these days but then it is written in Java eye rolling smiley

[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]
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Forrest Higgs
Re: AOI slow to open files
June 28, 2007 05:09PM
"It's only a rectangular block with about a dozen objects subtracted from it, cylinders and blocks. "

For AoI, that's big and nasty.
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Nik777
Re: AOI slow to open files
July 13, 2007 04:14AM
Hi Folks,

There is probably nothing I can do about the time it takes AOI to open the file, or regenerate the boolean representation. However, I can try to get a progress bar in there. I had been thinking that would be a good idea recently as well.

Edit: I'm not convinced that being written in Java is actually the problem in this case. I think the reason it takes the time it does is the way Booleans are represented and (in this case) how they are stored. The system chosen provides for a lot of flexibility, but that is bought with the time taken to initialise a Boolean, whether that is in creating one in memory, or regenerating one from its disk representation (which amounts to much the same thing).

Edit2: Ok, I've looked at this a bit further:
1. On my machine, the longest time taken is after the new (blank) window has been created, and before it has been displayed (with its 4 separate views, etc). This period is after the actual file has been opened and read.

2. Two minutes is an unusually long time.

Can I ask 3 questions please:

Q1: Is the 2 minutes elapsed predominantly before or after the new blank window has been displayed?

Q2: How are you starting AI, and what does 'Help About Art Of Illusion' say about your environment (avail memory, etc)?

Q3: How much RAM is in your machine?


Cheers!
Nik

Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 07/13/2007 06:02AM by Nik777.
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nophead
Re: AOI slow to open files
July 13, 2007 03:08PM
Nik,

1) It draws the frame window and the objects window with the objects in it almost instantly but the view windows just show what was already on the desktop. I.e. they are not even blanked. After a pause there is a short flurry of disk disk activity and then another long pause before the objects are drawn.

2) I start AOI either by the start menu and then file open or double click on the filename, same result. Here is the about window:

3) My machine has 1GB RAM.

I just timed it at 1.30 but that was a second run so everything was in the disk cache.

Thanks for your attention.

Chris

[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]
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Nik777
Re: AOI slow to open files
July 14, 2007 04:16AM
Hi Chris,

Quote

It draws the frame window and the objects window with the objects in it almost instantly[\quote]

Ok, from what you are describing, the delay is in the actual rendering of the views (and possibly generation of the rendering meshes).

So, I can suggest a few things that could cause an unusual delay in that part of the process:

1. Your OpenGL driver is in fact making things slower.
I've only seen this when someone tried enabling OpenGL on an old Win95 machine, but try disabling OpenGL rendering ('Edit | Preferences'), restarting AOI, and then re-opening the file.
It is also possible that you have some setting for your driver that is making it run slowly. Again, I've only seen this for older machines and drivers.

2. Your preferences have set a very small interactive surface error value.
Look in 'Edit | Preferences', and check the value for 'Interactive Surface Error'. I believe the default is 0.05. If you have it set to something like 0.001, then you are probably causing AOI to create 100 times more polygons for the same mesh as it would with a setting of 0.05, and probably go through 10 times the number of sub-division iterations to create those polygons.

3. Your Memory values in 'Help About' indicate that you have told Java it can take all of your 1GB of RAM, which leaves nothing for the OS. I highly doubt that this is the cause of your problem, but it might be worth checking the settings in your start-menu entry for AOI.
If you hvae something like: 'java -Xmx1024m ...', then you could try changing that to '-Xmx750m' to see if that has an effect.

4. The 'Help About' settings show very little actual memory use (as I would expect). Was this value recorded before you opened the file or after?

Cheers!
Nik
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nophead
Re: AOI slow to open files
July 14, 2007 05:35AM
Nik,
1) Disabling OpenGl makes it start instantly!

2) The surface error value is 0.05. I haven't changed anything since I installed it.

3) Memory usage was after opening the file. The start menu shortcut just runs the .exe. No mention of java.

4) The memory usage was after the file was opened.

So it looks like the problem is with OpenGl, but only at startup. Once loaded I can rotate, zoom and move things around without any noticeable delays. I haven't done much editing other than viewing existing objects so I don't know if delays would occur anywhere else. I did complete the hour glass tutorial some time ago and I don't remember anything slow then.

OpenGl is working in general on the system. I just ran a C++ application I wrote myself and it gets 60 frames per second. It's drawing some big textures on some fairly simple meshes. I would guess a few thousand triangles in all. This is what my program reports:

Renderer: GeForce4 MX Integrated GPU/PCI/SSE/3DNOW!, version 1.5.5.

Turning off OpenGl seems to be a reasonable work around. I did notice a few extra black lines at the edges of objects in this mode.

Thanks, Chris

[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]
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Nik777
Re: AOI slow to open files
July 14, 2007 07:54AM
Quote

1) Disabling OpenGl makes it start instantly!

Coowell smiling smiley Makes me feel like a regular Sherlock! smiling smiley

Ok, there may be some hope down the track:

I don't use Windows myself (unless forced), but I have noticed a significant increase in OpenGl problems being reported by Windows AOI users since we upgraded AOI to use to the latest JOGL (Java OpenGL Library). I theorised at the time that there were some problems in either some of the Windows JOGL.DLLs or some of the drivers.

Quote

So it looks like the problem is with OpenGl, but only at startup.
Could well be in initialisation code. It sounds like a timeout on a semaphore or lock somewhere.

I'll check the JOGL site to see if there are any forthcoming updates, and/or reported solutions to your problem. From sub-second to over a minute is a big problem somewhere!

Regardless, I'm glad we got you at least somewhat sorted.

Cheers!
Nik
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nophead
Re: AOI slow to open files
July 14, 2007 08:14AM
I wonder if this is affecting other Windows users here. Forrest didn't seem surprised by the delay.

[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]
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Forrest Higgs
Re: AOI slow to open files
July 14, 2007 09:00AM
Ah! So the OpenGL problem bites Windows AoI users yet again. I had to disable OpenGL in AoI about a year ago because it was causing the driver for my ATI video card to hang as often as not.

Mind, I've seen delays in loading complex objects in either STL or .aoi format in spite of having OpenGL disabled. When I use the Involute Profile Gear script I wrote last year to make a solid gear by filling the profile it generates with a triangular mesh and then extruding that profile you get an object that takes a significant amount of time to load irregardless of the format you decide to store it in. With stuff like that taking Vik's advice and simplifying the mesh is the way to go in reducing both file size and loading time.
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Nik777
Re: AOI slow to open files
July 16, 2007 10:53PM
With regard to JOGL, I've just read the following in the current JOGL user-guide:

Quote

For correct operation, it is necessary to specify the system property -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true when running JOGL applications on Windows; this system property disables the use of DirectDraw by Java2D. There are driver-level incompatibilities between DirectDraw and OpenGL which manifest themselves as application crashes, poor performance, bad flickering, and other artifacts. This poor behavior may exhibit itself when OpenGL and DirectDraw are simply used in the same application, not even just in the same window, so disabling Java2D's DirectDraw pipeline and forcing it to use its GDI pipeline is the only way to work around these issues.

If anyone who is on Windows and has had to disable JOGL for AOI is prepared to run a small test, I would be very interested to hear if the -Dsun.java2d.noddraw option helps.

The easy way to test would be to invoke AOI manually from a command line as follows:

java -Xmx??m -Dsun.java2.noddraw=true -jar /ArtOfIllusion.jar

where: ?? is the max memory AOI should use (typically 80% of your RAM)

and is the path to your AOI installation, which is typically
something like:
"c:\Program Files\ArtOfIllusion241"

I have some Windows machines here which perform poorly with JOGL, so I'll see if this option helps on these. However, the symptoms here are not as extreme as reported here.

Cheers!
Nik
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Nik777
Re: AOI slow to open files
July 16, 2007 11:14PM
Quote

I had to disable OpenGL in AoI about a year ago because it was causing the driver for my ATI video card to hang as often as not.

The same JOGL user-manual indicates that at least one (and possibly more) ATI cards were affected on Win XP by an ATI driver bug which caused a serious memory leak.

If you haven't updated your ATI drivers since you disabled JOGL, then you might consider trying JOGL again with the latest driver.

The JOGL documentation does describe a possible workaround, but they also indicate that: "There is no good general-purpose workaround for this bug which behaves well on all hardware."


Cheers!
Nik
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Forrest Higgs
Re: AOI slow to open files
July 16, 2007 11:52PM
I found that disabling OpenGl didn't significantly degrade the performance of AoI, so I stopped worrying about it.
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