GH timer slow?

Hey everybody,

I was wondering if I'm the only person having a really tough time getting the GH timer to not destroy any hopes I had of speed. Specifically, I'm using Kangaroo and I have to disable the timer to get any kind of response or function in grasshopper or rhino.

I have a pretty beefy machine and all of my other programs run alright but the GHtimer is killing me.

Any tips?

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on February 8, 2012 at 5:08pm

Hi Kameron,

I know the timer does sometimes cause problems, and I can't offer a complete solution, but a few tips that can help:

Make sure the timer is only running when you want to actually run the simulation. Particularly - do not switch the timer on while the Reset toggle of Kangaroo is set to True. The reset cycle is typically much heavier than a single simulation step, and if it is trying to do this repeatedly it can really slow things down.

Sometimes increasing the timer delay can actually help. This number is not the time between iterations, but just the time Grasshopper pauses before recalculating. I've found that if it is set very low (under 10ms) it occasionally becomes very difficult to stop the timer again. Upping the delay can avoid this, often at little noticeable speed cost.

I think there are probably better ways of dealing with update cycles in Kangaroo, and maybe one day it will get much faster, but I must admit I still find the programming of timers and threads pretty mystifying.

Also, if you want to post the Kangaroo file you are working with I might be able to suggest ways it could be sped up. There is often a lot that can be done by removing unnecessary interactions.

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