Blender takes ~32 seconds to start.

M

mikethe1wheelnut

[This -might- go in "Multimedia/Gaming", but I'm not using it for entertainment, so..]

I have tested Blender now with both FreeBSD and OpenBSD. On FreeBSD it takes ~32 seconds to start (one one-thousand..), on OpenBSD it takes ~3 (on my T430, latest release or close to it). Versions are probably different, files opened are, but not -that- different. (This is on the latest version of FreeBSD, 14.2-Release, on a Latitude E7450, using the calm window manager, cwm)

[For context only]

If you install blender, you will see that there are some issues observed with respect to it's dependencies. One of these is the announcement that one of them has no maintainer,
flite-2.1
Click to expand...
[flite is a -speech synthesis system-? ..since when does/did blender do speech synthesis?? -clearly I don't use it for that :)]
and another that
pcre-8.45_4
Click to expand...
[this looks like a known issue, and so may be fairly easy to fix -indeed, the notice includes instructions to use pcre2 instead.]
is deprecated. "..you may wish to reconsider installing it.." So there are obvious known issues with the software, that might explain it's slowness to load, and, possibly, other problems which may become apparent if I start trying to use it.

So.. if I did not have the option of doing my work in OpenBSD and only using FreeBSD for things that are not easy/convenient to do with Open, I might be motivated to become a maintainer. I still might be. Curiosity has always been an archilles heel. ..And I might find a whole host of problems with the OpenBSD version.

I have now submitted one PR (on a different subject), and so am familiar with the basic process. I think submitting one about ports follows essentially the same process.

And yes, if I am to do this, become a maintainer, I will have to read the porters handbook.

[End | For context only]

Would anybody care to speculate as to whether the above ports issues could be the cause of the slowness to launch?
 
Interesting. I've not known anyone to use blender in BSD because without CUDA support I imagine rendering takes forever.

And no, lack of CUDA should not be responsible for slow startup, since CUDA is primarily used for rendering frame sequences
 
kent_dorfman766 said:
Interesting. I've not known anyone to use blender in BSD because without CUDA support I imagine rendering takes forever.

And no, lack of CUDA should not be responsible for slow startup, since CUDA is primarily used for rendering frame sequences
Click to expand...

Yes, that -is- an interesting perspective.

Believe it or not, I've gotten by with blender so far without actually ever rendering. The "textures" function, which allows you to see your creations in colour, has always done the job for me just fine :)

All that said, a major goal here being to get off of linux.. ..I might have to go back to linux eventually to render. If I eventually decide I need to. Because committing myself to "solving the CUDA problem" without actually knowing what that would entail, would be plain foolish.

Indeed, having now done some research, "the CUDA problem" will be beyond me.
 
I use Blender, Eevee Renderer requires no CUDA. With all of my addons on a cold start it took 6 seconds of me counting out.

Did you compile yourself or pull the pkg? I am using the pkg currently.

14.2 Ryzen 2700X AMD 6750XT.
 
prompt$ time blender
Blender quit
0m06.29s real 0m.5.72s user 0m.00.52s system

What happens if you run blender with time before it and quit once it's up? Does it show similar times?
 
thedaemon said:
prompt$ time blender
Blender quit
0m06.29s real 0m.5.72s user 0m.00.52s system

What happens if you run blender with time before it and quit once it's up? Does it show similar times?
Click to expand...
..I'm not actually sure what you want me to do. I launch blender using a hot-key combo from cwm, not from the command-line..
I just tried launching it from the command-line, outside cwm, using
$ time blender
Click to expand...
and got:
GHOST: failed to initialize display for back-end(s): ['WAYLAND', 'X11'], etc.
Click to expand...
 
First things first.
Since both are installed on two different machines (OpenBSD on a T430, FreeBSD on a Latitude E7450) with two different drives I always check the hardware first: speed, integrity, occupancy + what other large app is in memory?
Or to say it flatly: If the FreeBSD version is installed on a 4G RAM machine with a slow, maybe even defective drive, almost at full capacity... you don't need to discuss software installation reasons.
 
I am running it under sway, here is an example of using time blender (note that it takes some human time to quit the app).
Saved session recovery to "/tmp/quit.blend"

Blender quit

________________________________________________________
Executed in 6.51 secs fish external
usr time 3.87 secs 0.00 micros 3.87 secs
sys time 0.14 secs 219.00 micros 0.14 secs
Click to expand...

And as for hardware, it is an nvme ssd drives with a Ryzen 5 4600G

And I don't have an error about display backend failing to initialize, this should be your next move to investigate I suppose ?

And as suggest by Maturin, you cannot really compare performance between software if you change the hardware beneath it.
 
Maturin said:
First things first.
Since both are installed on two different machines (OpenBSD on a T430, FreeBSD on a Latitude E7450) with two different drives I always check the hardware first: speed, integrity, occupancy + what other large app is in memory?
Or to say it flatly: If the FreeBSD version is installed on a 4G RAM machine with a slow, maybe even defective drive, almost at full capacity... you don't need to discuss software installation reasons.
Click to expand...

I just checked the hard-drive with dmesg.boot, just to be sure. Turns out it's one of my "larger" hard-drives, 500G. Essentially brand-new, though I haven't gotten used, yet, to testing such things. It -has- done some heavy lifting, I asked it to back-up my 1T external hard drive, twice.. but that -should- be well within what such a thing is capable of. It's a WD.

As for other large apps that might be in memory, the ones I'm currently downloading are firefox, iridium, gedit, rsync, syncthing.. I flirted with caja, but I'm not sure I'll need it. As for the drive being full of other files, I just re-installed the operating system and haven't started using it yet. So there might be only three new files on it: .xinitrc, .cwmrc, and my wallpaper file :) I think .cwmrc is the longest, with perhaps 6 lines or so.. :)

The installations on both systems are nearly identical, by design. The T430, meanwhile, was purchased refurbished a few months ago. So it's hard-drive will be similar, probably 128G, unless I miss my guess. ..I might have bought a larger one, so that all my computers had the same capacity.. don't remember.
 
monwarez said:
And as suggest by Maturin, you cannot really compare performance between software if you change the hardware beneath it.
Click to expand...
Normally I would agree, but in this case, ..a T430 is not exactly a bleeding-edge machine. People looked at me strange when they realized I really was serious about buying such a thing. :) I'm pretty sure the 7450 is supposed to be faster, so if changed hardware does anything, it should speed it up.
And I don't have an error about display backend failing to initialize, this should be your next move to investigate I suppose ?
Click to expand...
I'm waiting on clarification of what I was actually supposed to do for that test.
 
Can Blender be started up from Terminal with verbose output?

Like if I start firefox it shows verbose info about what it's doing and shows useful stuff for VAAPI if it can't find it. Blender might show what's going on while starting, and might delay/timeout with something?
 
monwarez said:
The test was:
time blender
Then quit blender once it appears
Report back what was written.
Click to expand...
thedaemon
For me, at least, it wasn't that clear at all. What I realized in the last half-hour or so, and have now done, was to do precisely that, -from inside cwm-, -from the xterm command-line- inside cwm.

Result (..very interesting..):

$ time blender
W: [] caps.c: Normally all extra capabilities would be dropped now, but that's impossible because PulseAudio was built without capabilities support.
Saved session recovery to "/tmp/quit.blend"

Blender quit
38.40 real 12.33 user 0.59 sys
$
Click to expand...

The 12.33 user .. I do wait a bit longer, apparently 12 seconds? for blender to go from a grey box to actually looking like blender. So the 38 seconds.. ..really is about on the dot. ..assuming I understand properly how "time" works.

And no, if PulseAudio is on my system, it isn't because I installed it (improperly). This must be a problem with the base system that only shows up on my particular machine?

And no, I have not attempted any sound-checks on this system yet.. ..well, sound -does- work. It's very quiet, can hardly hear it, but I'll be able to adjust that..
 
Last edited:
Espionage724 said:
Can Blender be started up from Terminal with verbose output?

Like if I start firefox it shows verbose info about what it's doing and shows useful stuff for VAAPI if it can't find it. Blender might show what's going on while starting, and might delay/timeout with something?
Click to expand...
$ time blender verbose
W: [] caps.c: Normally all extra capabilities would be dropped now, but that's impossible because PulseAudio was built without capabilities support.
Error: Cannot read file "/tmp/verbose": No such file or directory
Error: argument has no '.blend' file extension, not using as new file, exiting! /tmp/verbose

Blender quit
31.63 real 6.83 user 0.38 sys
$
Click to expand...
Maybe, but I don't know how yet..
..maybe add a "-"..
$ time blender -verbose
W: [] caps.c: Normally all extra capabilities would be dropped now, but that's impossible because PulseAudio was built without capabilities support.
unknown argument, loading as file: -verbose
Error: Cannot read file "/tmp/-verbose": No such file or directory
Error: argument has no '.blend' file extension, not using as new file, exiting! /tmp/-verbose

Blender quit
31.38 real 6.65 user 0.27 sys
$
Click to expand...
 
mikethe1wheelnut said:
And no, if PulseAudio is on my system, it isn't because I installed it (improperly). This must be a problem with the base system that only shows up on my particular machine?

And no, I have not attempted any sound-checks on this system yet.. ..well, sound -does- work. It's very quiet, can hardly hear it, but I'll be able to adjust that..
Click to expand...

You could try to start blender without audio:
$ blender -noaudio

Also have a look at the possible options:
$ blender --help

To display some more informations:
$ blender --log "*" --log-level -1
 
HayPhil said:
You could try to start blender without audio:
$ blender -noaudio
Click to expand...
$ time blender -noaudio
Saved session recovery to "/tmp/quit.blend"

Blender quit
13.38 real 12.03 user 0.54 sys
Click to expand...
So.. It "starts" up much faster, but the grey screen remains grey for almost the same length of time.
"Help" has a looong list of options, will have to check that out later. Same with the log option. Will get back to you on that! :)
 
Sorry for not clarifying what time did and where to run it. I assumed too much.

Well good news is that mine has the same error message as yours, and a bit more due to addons :) You can see below.

Now a suggestion would be to remove your $HOME/.config/blender/ directory and relaunch Blender. I don't know if you said what the GPU / GPU driver is?


W: [] caps.c: Normally all extra capabilities would be dropped now, but that's impossible because PulseAudio was built without capabilities support.
 
thedaemon said:
Now a suggestion would be to remove your $HOME/.config/blender/ directory and relaunch Blender. I don't know if you said what the GPU / GPU driver is?
Click to expand...
There -is- no GPU.. ..slinks under desk, curls up in shame.. I'm middle-school. (..Old-school is seriously hard-core..) Or poor, depending on your perspective. I use hardware that'll fall over at the pressure of a finger.. :) (..Sorry, too much exposure to the internet pleasure-mill..) I have a friend with a beefed up desktop that I borrow when I want to do heavy-lifting :) The day will come, perhaps, when I gain access to serious computing power :)

..$HOME/.config/blender, huh? ..why not? :) ..no change.
 
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