We’ve been struggling with definitions using hugemongwhopping amounts of memory until we finally understood (thanks Alan) that Grasshopper internally generates meshes even for components with “Preview” disabled.
In short, disabling the preview of all components saves only the display time, but not the mesh generating time.
The only way to get some of our definitions to work is to tick the “Don’t draw any preview geometry” toggle !
This deprives us of useful preview, but at least we can get the job done.
I understand that there’s a good intention behind this : when a component’s preview is switched on, the preview objects appear instantly, but I think it’s extremely wasteful when the definition enters it’s “production” lifetime.
Most of the components containing geometry are not meant to be displayed at all when the the definition is in the hands of the user, yet they are useful at development stage to check stuff out.
So maybe there should be an option to switch between the present behavior (I’d call it “Developper mode”), and a mode in which only the meshes from “Preview-enabled” components would be actually computed (that would be “User mode”).
In “Developper mode”, it would be much better to display preview geometry of selected components, EVEN if they are set to “Preview off”.
This would be so much simpler than having to switch it to “Preview on” when in a debugging phase.
How’z’about that ?