Hey hello!
Just wondering if it is normal for the block manager to take a very long time to open. And every time you change 1 block in the block manager without closing it, it seems like rather then refreshing just that one entry in the block manager it seems to reload all the blocks again. causing the same waiting time as opening it.
Would like to hear if you guys have the same experience.
Hi Peter,
do you have linked blocks pointing to a network drive by chance ? If so, try to get rid of them or put them on your local hdd or better ssd 
c.
I’m afraid they are pointing to a network drive yes, but putting them locally is not really an option since multiple people are using the same blocks and they need to be up to date.
Would upgrading the network lower these times drastically?
Hi Peter,
this i just guesswork but do you get slow response times from this network in general ? I too would like to have some kind of routine in Rhino to read linked blocks from a network share into memory for faster access while such a rhino file containing these blocks is opened the first time. @pascal maybe this could be added to V6 ?
c.
Hello Clement,
I would not really be able to tell, browsing the files on the network and opening smaller files does not seem to have this problem, opening large files does take long, but I don’t know if this is network related, or just because the file is so big.
Hi Peter,
you might compare the time it takes to open the large files from the network and from your local drive to find out where the bottleneck is. I´ve found that things can get slightly optimized by saving the blocks with coarse rendermeshes, especially if the block is instanced multiple times. Btw. how big is big in megabytes ?
c.
I’ll copy the files to my drive and see if it changes significantly. Thanks for the tip!
Block files:
50 - 300 MB take a long time
File without blocks ( not using anymore but used to take a long time also.)
1.700 MB
is this 1.7 MB or 1700 MB ?
The OLD file was 1.7 GB ^^
The Current file using blocks is around 250MB with a folder with blocks of almost 2 GB in size linked throughout the file.
waiting times are to be expected with such large datasets. Do you have the option to optimize the block file contents further ?
One thing i´ve used in the past is a ram disc in combination with a download script. The download script grabbed the block files from the shared network (in our case it has been a www adress) and puts them on R:\ (the ramdisk). This technique reduced the access times significantly as the geometry was read from memory with 6000MB/s. However, the display speed in Rhino was the next bottleneck…so i´ve gotten rid of blocks and replaced all contents with a large joined mesh using, at least, the colors from the blocked geometry as mesh vertex colors. This allowed us to at least view and work with the datasets but the disadvantages of doing this are obvious…
c.
I doubt we can optimize any further. I guess we’ll just have to work with the slow loading times. I don’t expect we’ll be getting any ram storage options here. : )
Thanks for your insight!