Load Time Test

Krisidious · 17 Jan 2011, 21:02

so how long does your SketchUp install take to load?

here's a stop watch... http://www.xnotestopwatch.com/download.html#download

but that's not going to be very precise.

let's discuss how we can best count how long it takes to start up and count how many plugins we have installed?

I bet the SU Gurus have a method for us...

thomthom · 17 Jan 2011, 22:37

Note - the first time you start SketchUp after booting up will take longer than if you close SU and immediately restart it.

Krisidious · 17 Jan 2011, 22:39

SketchUp Pro 8 on Win 7 Ultimate 64bit took 16 seconds to load with all my plugins. I don't know how to best count how many plugins I have but there are a lot.

doing a search of my plugin folder I have 572 items that end in .rb and 101 end in .rbs so I think I have 673 plugins... would that be right?

soo

673 plugins 16 second load time. 22 second load time after rebooting.

@unknownuser said:

Re: Load Time Test
by thomthom on Mon Jan 17, 2011 5:37 pm

Note - the first time you start SketchUp after booting up will take longer than if you close SU and immediately restart it.

I'll restart and check...

Rich O Brien · 17 Jan 2011, 22:46

I find that TGI3d and 1001bits are slowing my start up the most as I have them in 7.1 but not in 8

13 secs of a difference

82 plugins installed = 22secs(v8)/35secs(v7.1)

Windows 7 / 64bit OS / 4GB Ram

Gaieus · 17 Jan 2011, 23:04

Well, I do not know Tgi3D but have seen 1001bit and certainly that is not "just one" plugin.

Rich O Brien · 17 Jan 2011, 23:06

TGI3d has a splash screen that says 'Do not show on start up' and a checkbox...i can't click it

It makes me so angry i feel like pinching Thom

Chris Fullmer · 17 Jan 2011, 23:10

I bet it only becomes enabled once you pay the $$$ for the software. (I guess I'm assuming you have the demo, perhaps I'm entirely off base).

One could add a script to the very top of the script list alphabetically that started a timer, and then another script at the end of the script list that stopped the timer and output the time. That would give a count for how long the plugins took to load. THat might be itneresting - might turn out the plugins aren't the slowdown to begin with (though probably not likely I guess?).

Rich O Brien · 17 Jan 2011, 23:23

I forgot to add that i had no floating windows on during this test so my times are not effected by the material/component browser slowdown.

And yes it's the demo, do i look like some with $999? I'd pay that to get the word 'Beta' off ShapeBender though

Box · 17 Jan 2011, 23:47

Dare I say it, 16 sec, 13 sec, once upon a time you would wait minutes for a web page to open.

Personally I keep seldom used plugins in a different folder and add them if I need them. Many plugins do similar if not the same things and it's worth understanding what you use best, and removing the ones you don't need.

Gaieus · 18 Jan 2011, 00:07

@box said:

Personally I keep seldom used plugins in a different folder and add them if I need them. Many plugins do similar if not the same things and it's worth understanding what you use best, and removing the ones you don't need.

I do something similar - just rename them *.rbb so this way they do not load.

fuzzion · 18 Jan 2011, 01:53

TGI3d takes so long to load that sometimes I wish I brought camping gear

PS. Does anyone know why its the longest loading plugin and why it uses both my CPU cores when I Up-sample geometry? To clarify, the CPU indicator on task mamanager goes from the usual 50% to 80% and sometimes 90+%

Chris Fullmer · 18 Jan 2011, 04:35

It probably takes all the processing of points and subdivision and processes that outside of SketchUp. So they could have threaded that so it works over multiple processors.

thomthom · 18 Jan 2011, 07:25

V-Ray for SketchUp adds greatly to loading time. I turn it off under extensions and use my V-Ray Toys plugin to load it on demand.

fuzzion · 18 Jan 2011, 07:59

@thomthom said:

V-Ray for SketchUp adds greatly to loading time. I turn it off under extensions and use my V-Ray Toys plugin to load it on demand.

Master ruby plugin maker Tom Do you think its possible to make some sort of Vray HDRI visualisation tool plug-in? I would forever and ever be eternally grateful !

PS. Love your camera sync tool for vray

thomthom · 18 Jan 2011, 08:17

I have been thinking of a tool that maps an environment to a sphere which you could manipulate - but you'd then have to convert the HDRI into a format that SketchUp can use as a texture.

gulcanocali · 18 Jan 2011, 12:25

Hello,

Kristoff, thank you for starting this thread. It seems that some people are experiencing load time issues with Tgi3D. We are looking into it. One thing that comes to mind right off the bat is:

Tgi3D SU products check for updates every ten loads or so, if the internet connection is slow that might also slow the load time. Additionally, Tgi3D SU PhotoScan 30-Day Trial Edition connects to the license server everytime it loads, again may slow things down if the internet connection is slow.

@unknownuser said:

TGI3d has a splash screen that says 'Do not show on start up' and a checkbox...i can't click it

Rich, you should be able to disable splash screen even for the free Training Edition of Tgi3D SU Amorph and the 30-Day Trial Edition of Tgi3D SU PhotoScan. Could you please try one more time and bring the splash screen from “Help --> About Tgi3D” and click the “Do not show this screen on start up” check box? Does anyone else have the same problem of persistent Tgi3D splash screen?

@unknownuser said:

And yes it's the demo, do i look like some with $999? I'd pay that to get the word 'Beta' off ShapeBender though

I would like remind here that we have two sets of plugins, Amorph and PhotoScan. Amorph being priced a lot less than PhotoScan. PhotoScan is a specialized product that allows you to create highly accurate 3D models of real life objects from photographs. It includes a seperate executable called the Tgi3D SU PhotoScan Calibration and Metrology Tool, which provides state-of-the-art camera calibration and metrology capabilities that can also report measurement uncertainties accurately.

We understand that pricing of PhotoScan may be an issue for many SketchUp users, however, we believe that Tgi3D SU Amorph is a really beneficial set of utilities that would appeal to majority of the SketchUp users as well. Please keep in mind that all the other capabilities of Tgi3D SU plugins are included in the Amorph product like view locking, selection utilities, extrusion crosss section editing, curve editing, surface mesh creation and smoothing, surface remeshing and upsampling, and recently released UV mapping and texturing utility.

By the way, we are also working on a soon-to-be-released new feature to reduce the polygon count of a model (down-sampling, if you will) while preserving the model fidelity in a controllable fashion.

Regards,

Gulcan Ocali
Product Manager
http://www.Tgi3D.com

Rich O Brien · 18 Jan 2011, 14:01

@unknownuser said:

Rich, you should be able to disable splash screen even for the free Training Edition of Tgi3D SU Amorph and the 30-Day Trial Edition of Tgi3D SU PhotoScan. Could you please try one more time and bring the splash screen from “Help --> About Tgi3D” and click the “Do not show this screen on start up” check box?

That did the trick

But the initial splashscreen was unclickable and it appeared 50% off screen on my PC. This occurred after trying to click on start-up.

I do like tgi3d's abilities. For me the cross-section tool is unbelievable. Nearly on par with Blender's 'Seam' function to a certain extent. And the $149 price isn't that bad considering the toolset on offer. I haven't tried the Photoscan feature as i didn't register for the 30 day trial. But I'll definitely try it out.

What i would like to draw members attention to is that the $999 plugin includes all the features of TGI3d Amorph along with the Photoscan ability.

jeff hammond · 18 Jan 2011, 14:56

~5.5 seconds to launch with plugins folder in place (not sure how many plugins i have but there are 45 .rb files at the top level of the plugins folder.. probably another 45 in subfolders)

~3 seconds without the plugins folder.

fuzzion · 18 Jan 2011, 16:46

@unknownuser said:

@unknownuser said:

Rich, you should be able to disable splash screen even for the free Training Edition of Tgi3D SU Amorph and the 30-Day Trial Edition of Tgi3D SU PhotoScan. Could you please try one more time and bring the splash screen from “Help --> About Tgi3D” and click the “Do not show this screen on start up” check box?

That did the trick

But the initial splashscreen was unclickable and it appeared 50% off screen on my PC. This occurred after trying to click on start-up.

I do like tgi3d's abilities. For me the cross-section tool is unbelievable. Nearly on par with Blender's 'Seam' function to a certain extent. And the $149 price isn't that bad considering the toolset on offer. I haven't tried the Photoscan feature as i didn't register for the 30 day trial. But I'll definitely try it out.

What i would like to draw members attention to is that the $999 plugin includes all the features of TGI3d Amorph along with the Photoscan ability.

A unique feature of TGI3d in my opinion is the upsample and create mesh from any closed loop by selecting a loop and clicking
the make mesh function. With upsample i can get ultra high polygon models for free by going to SU warehouse and downloading what i want. Then click upsample 2 to 3 times and model looks like you got it from a professional model shop. 149 isnt that expensive if u include the lifetime of free upgrades one can get and how brain dead easy it is to use

@ Tom , re. HDRI visualisation plugin for Vray. If you convert it to a texture, can SU handle my 14000x7000 HDRI skies ? I was always told that the limit on SU is something really small? And if it cant, then the work around would be to create a sphere stitched together from multiple small textures that were broken up from the large HDRI by the plugin and placed upon the sphere as one final image. Its almost 1am and im tired so really sorry if i dont make sense.

@Ruby plugin makers. Can plugins on SU run on multi cores? And if so, what is stopping so many of our plugins from doing so?

thomthom · 18 Jan 2011, 22:49

@fuzzion said:

@ Tom , re. HDRI visualisation plugin for Vray. If you convert it to a texture, can SU handle my 14000x7000 HDRI skies ? I was always told that the limit on SU is something really small?

SketchUp can load large textures, but it won't display them in their full size. Think it due to OpenGL. Textures will be sampled down to max 1024px. (or 2048 if you enable large textures)
But in the scenario I talked about where you converted an HDRI to a format SU could read - you would also sample it down. After all, it's just a quick preview to orient the environment map.

@fuzzion said:

@Ruby plugin makers. Can plugins on SU run on multi cores?

The Ruby in SketchUp can't run multiple threads very well. Full of issues. Though, one could make a C Extension, but it's much more complicated writing in C.

Regardless...

@fuzzion said:

And if so, what is stopping so many of our plugins from doing so?

Because most operations can't be split into multiple cores. This applies to most software. Adding more cores isn't a magic bullet. Running on multiple cores means splitting up the operation and that is something that often (most the times) can't be done because the computation needs to be done in a linear fashion.
Same as with the whole 64bit discussion, it's not a holy grale that's going to make everything awesome. Multi-core and 64bit are buzzwords which users of software have picked up on. When I heard people ask for this I read it as a request for better performance. Though it would be better if users simply said that, and left the technical solution to the developers who knows what is possible and feasible for the given task. It will vary from software to software. Speed improvements comes in many shapes - it can be a new improved algorithm, or simply doing the work in a different way.