Folder DAT Cooktime

Beginners
1

It’s good to be humbled by TouchDesigner.

I have a folder DAT whose root folder parameter I’m changing from time to time for a slide show. I’ve noticed lately that changing that parameter causes a bind, and that the folder DAT has cook time of 3.6 seconds. What am I missing about how the folder DAT operates? This seems like a lot of cook time to return the contents of a directory, so I’m sure there’s more going on than meets the eye.

So, I guess the question is - what is the folder DAT doing that would result in a long cook time?

2

My humblings are frequent and hilarious, if its any consolation!

3.6 seconds is a long time though. I just checked performance monitor to see if it would have some more helpful data but nothing outside the cook time.

I’d be curious to know whats going on behind the scenes as well.

3

It is making quite a few system calls to be notified when recursive changes to the folder are made.
We have made some improvements, so any details on your particular case would be useful, if you want to email us at support@derivative.ca

Rob

4

Email sent.

I also included a tox with some examples of how I worked around this.

glob ended up being an easy way to make this work for me.

[url]https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/glob.html[/url]

5

Hi,
I get very long cook times ( > 5 seconds ) in the Folder DAT when changing the root folder parameter, or adding files to the root folder.

My take on this is to open a new Touch Designer instance, put a Folder DAT in it, and the send then file list via TouchOut DAT.

6

Normally, that’s the direction I would consider going, but for the installation I’m working on right now that isn’t an option.

glob works well in creating a list of file names in a table - so that’s the direction I’m currently headed.