PerformanceMonitor

From Odwiki

The Performance Monitor can be found in the application menus on the top of Houdini and can be invoked using the Alt+y hotkey and scripted with the 'performance' hscript command.

The Performance Monitor will print the execution time for nodes and for viewport redraws and such. It can be invaluable for:

• Optimizing rigs and systems: You can see where Houdini spend the most amount of time and now you can plan to optimize it. Here are some hints:
  • If expressions are being run per point (in, say, a PointSOP) then perhaps replacing this with a VEX procedure could speed it up. Sometimes artists repeat an expression for the three colour/vector components when they could only do it once for a scalar attribute.
  • In the case of CopyStamp operations, sometimes re-ordering the operations can cut down on the amount of recomputation. This is very dependent on what it is you're trying to achieve exactly but it often happens you can change your workflow and get the same result.
• Debugging: Sometimes you'll find that a node refused to cook and perhaps it has a RedFlag that disappears as soon as you try to read it and then the SOP magically works again. This is often caused by CyclicExpressions and the cause of which can be tricky to find. The Performance Monitor will log these messages that nodes produce and sometimes just running Performance Monitor and reading them all will make things a lot more clear on how errors cascade or spread in network.
  • The above case also happens frequently in CopyStamp operations since a single execution of the Copy Stamp loop cooks it's input SOPs multiple times and each cook might produce an error message that be cleared by subsequent cooks if you only try to read the message that appears in the MMB info on the SOP Node itself. The Monitor will show you all the cooks of each node and their message beside them.