Toxik Running Slow

[N8]

I just installed Toxik today and boy is it slow. As soon as I add a reaction node it goes to pot. Any thoughts? I added a new SATA drive and installed the software on there. That is also where my mediacache is. I also moved the footage I was working with to the same drive. I upped my VM as well to like 4 gigs. I have a P4 2.8ghz with 4 gigs of ram, and I am using a Quadro FX 3450. Any thoughts?

[guillem ramisa]

@N8 24849 wrote:

I just installed Toxik today and boy is it slow. As soon as I add a reaction node it goes to pot. Any thoughts? I added a new SATA drive and installed the software on there. That is also where my mediacache is. I also moved the footage I was working with to the same drive. I upped my VM as well to like 4 gigs. I have a P4 2.8ghz with 4 gigs of ram, and I am using a Quadro FX 3450. Any thoughts?

Sounds weird. I’ve tested it on my latptop (asus a8js) and it was pretty responsive for that kind of setup. One thing I can say though is that if you really want the best performance possible you should get a raid0 and point the mediachache to that raid. The way Toxik works is that it will automatically cache all the media that you link to in your project and that cache should be on the fastest drive possible.
The Quadro card should be fine but the reaction thing might sound like a graphics card issue. You should check that the driver version you use is supported. I’ve also read (probably not your particular problem but anyways) that to get the smoothest playback the screen frequency should be a multiply of the fps setting in your project.

[D W]

@N8 24849 wrote:

I just installed Toxik today and boy is it slow. As soon as I add a reaction node it goes to pot. Any thoughts? I added a new SATA drive and installed the software on there. That is also where my mediacache is. I also moved the footage I was working with to the same drive. I upped my VM as well to like 4 gigs. I have a P4 2.8ghz with 4 gigs of ram, and I am using a Quadro FX 3450. Any thoughts?

Hi

If you experience the main slow down in Reaction then this is most likely because by default your player is set to view in software and you are therefore getting the performance that the CPU is getting you. If you switch to ‘Interactivity’ in the player options you will then be using the Quadro FX to work in Reaction.

The other reason that you may be experiencing slow performance is that it is also recommended that you have a dual processor or dual core machine to get the most out of Toxik and its multi-threaded architecture. As suggested above, if it is possible you should also put the mediacache on a separate drive/array to the application and media to increase the read/write performance.

Hope this helps.
Nick

[Victor Makali]

Thanks for the tips. But for some reason its still moving slow. Even with no footage in the comp. As soon as I add a reaction it slows way down. I am going to try a new install and see if that helps at all. If you have any other Ideas that would be great.

[Mark]

Hi N8,

I got the same problem after I installed Toxik2008. I got weird error messages.
To my case, I needed to install recent version of Nvidia Driver.
It seems to be okay with Reaction now.
You should try that.

Quadro FX 1400 – Driver verison 169.61

[Mark]

Hi N8,

I got the same problem after I installed Toxik2008. I got weird error messages.
To my case, I needed to install recent version of Nvidia Driver.
It seems to be okay with Reaction now.
You should try that.

Quadro FX 1400 – Driver verison 169.61

[chris]

@N8 24849 wrote:

I just installed Toxik today and boy is it slow. As soon as I add a reaction node it goes to pot. Any thoughts? I added a new SATA drive and installed the software on there. That is also where my mediacache is. I also moved the footage I was working with to the same drive. I upped my VM as well to like 4 gigs. I have a P4 2.8ghz with 4 gigs of ram, and I am using a Quadro FX 3450. Any thoughts?

there are a few issues you might attend to with the described setup, and others that might be due to your setup.

reaction. this can take advantage of the videocard at the hardware level or it can be bypassed. if its off, then it will still support floating point color in the processing pipeline, but interactivity of the 3d space will go down. this is by design. to enable interactivity you have to bring up the gate UI while hovering over a player, then swipe down thru the south gate to bring up the options for that player. set it to tool output and enable interactivity.

P4. toxik is extremly mutli-processor aware and designed to take advantage of it. under the hood (this is the short description) its tiling your images into 512×512 tiles. its not the same as proxies but kinda similar – and automatic. each tile is processed by a thread/core so if, for example, you have 1080 up and apply a show tiles utility node, you will see how many processors/cores that toxik woudl ideally need to process that. if you zoom out below 50% then the tiles will reduce by 4x. in short, a single P4 isnt the best solution for Toxik.

mediacache. a single sata drive wont be able to play back much more than DV/D1. add to the fact that your source media is on the same drive as the mediacache, and that poor drive is workign twice as hard as it needs to.

i hope that helps you out. some of them you can do something about immediately (the single P4 however may prove to be your biggest problem and the most difficult to remedy).

//gD

[Victor Makali]

Thanks for the heads up on that stuff. I will take a look at all of thoes settings. Thanks agian.

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