Performance drops when moving mouse with multiple engines

Bugs
1

Hi, I’m having problem with performance dropping when moving mouse and having multiple instances of Touchdesigner open.

Here are captures of tests I made when trying to isolate the problem. I saved an empty Base as .tox and loaded it with multiple Engine COMP’s. With 20+ engines just moving mouse on anywhere in windows all touchdesigner windows completely freeze, and they keep frozen until I stop moving mouse.

The left “AudioReac” is completely another touchdesigner project and instance. The red graph is fps.

22 Engines, not moving mouse:

image
image989×789 67.1 KB

22 engines, moving mouse:

image
image1080×771 66.5 KB

3 engines, moving mouse:

image
image1115×605 60.5 KB

The weird thing is that the performance monitor won’t trigger when setting the Frame trigger (ms) to 30, even when the fps drops to zero. Also the probe won’t show any spikes with CPU or GPU processing or RAM usage.

The problem persists even after unloading the Engines. I also tried settings the clocks to independent.

Infos:

  • Touchdesigner version 2022.32660
  • Windows 10 Pro, 10.0.190.44
  • CPU: Ryzen 5 5900x
  • GPU: Nvidia RTX 3090 24GB VRAM
  • RAM: DDR4 3600MHz 64GB

The same problem also existed in older build: 2022.26590.

I will appreciate any help with this. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in building a live visual synthesizer that depends on loading a lot of effects using the engines. I even upgraded hardware but got zero gains. It feels like all of the UI’s of all the touch engine processes are connected and blocking each other somehow. Even though the engine’s shouldn’t have UI / care from mouse input.

2

What does your Windows performance monitor say in terms of your CPU and GPU usage %? And does that change when you are moving the mouse?

3

There is some increased load across the threads, but the total percentage is low.

Here in the top-right graph I separated some phases:

  1. Two spikes when I created the Engines
  2. Cpu usage low. Mouse still.
  3. Cpu usage elevated, Mouse moving
  4. Cpu usage low. Mouse still.
  5. Cpu usage elevated. Dragging around the network in editor (it is like a slideshow)

image
image1090×788 63.3 KB

The GPU stays under 4%

4

Here is GPU data.

image
image761×659 15.3 KB

5

Are you able to share your whole project with support@derivative.ca and we can take a closer look?

6

Here is the minimum setup for replicating the problem.

laggy_engines.toe (5.2 KB)
empty.tox (238 Bytes)

Here is a video where the problem occurs: Microsoft OneDrive - Access files anywhere. Create docs with free Office Online.

I just noticed that there is no frame drop when the Task manager is the active window.

7

Unfortunately I’m unable to reproduce the issue with that example file. The FPS stays stable in all cases. Do you have a more complex example you can share?

8

I sent the full project via email.

9

Any updates on this?

10

Haven’t had a chance to look further into it, but its on my todo

11

Hi @rytai - we’re having trouble recreating this here, even with your full project. Do you still see it in TouchDesigner 33600?

Do you have any software installed which might interfere with the mouse or graphics drivers? Some OEM software can cause problems - in those cases a clean install of Windows can solve the problem.