how set system to increase grasshopper speed?

Hi All,

I'm from Italy and this is my first discussion;

I'd like to know if there is a specific configuration to use grasshopper... I've noticed that modeling with rhino 4 and GH go very slowly; when I change paramenters in GH sliders I see the progress in rhino with 4/5 seconds lag.

I think it is not an hardware issue, this is my configuration

Mainboard SuperMicro

Dual CPU Xeon x5650 (24 total core)

12GB DDRIII ECC

Hdd velociraptor 300Gb

Vga Nvidia Quadro FX3800

Hi, I attach the project files; when I move the slider bubbles trying to slide from a little value to another (like 50, 120, ecc) the result on screen is slowly to be shown.
My question is, with the pc configuration listed above, is it normal with this project?
There are parameters I can set in Grasshopper or Rhino to have faster results?
There's a specific driver or configuration for my video card to improve performance?

I would be very interested to see if the hardware on my system allows optimal performance with grasshopper or is normal with a definition so short ,even if it is the Voronoi , the system so slow to refresh when I move the slider

Thank you for your time

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on October 13, 2010 at 12:54pm

The speed you are getting sounds about right, nothing wrong with your configuration. The main bottleneck in your definition is not the voronoi component but the "surface morph" component. To increase speed you need a faster processor. It doesn't matter the number of cores it has since it will only use one (for now at least), what matters are the GHz.

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on October 13, 2010 at 1:22pm

If you are going to use it for visualization you can try meshing the extruded breps (using the "mesh brep" component) and then morphing the meshes. This will go around 10-20 times faster (if the profiler is working correctly), depending on the mesh quality settings. Once you figure out the right parameters you can plug in the brep again for a detailed model. If you are going to use it for rendering maybe you don't even need to.

Permalink Reply by Massimiliano Trave on October 13, 2010 at 5:16pm

thank you for your answer, let's see if I understand you advise me to a faster processor to increase speed, you could tell me what kind of processor I want to tell you the truth I thought that a configuration like mine was more than enough to get maximum performance, however, testing the machine with the simple definition that I posted, I was surprised that the system still does not respond quickly, and then my intention was to find out if you have a system with this configuration, so slow working it was normal with grasshopper? or am I having to configure a system that does not give me maximum performance with a grasshopper. so please if you tell me a bit more accurate solutions on how to intervene because I am still in a testing phase and have the possibility to change the configuration.

thank you for your time

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on October 13, 2010 at 5:30pm

Well, my advice was to create a less cpu demanding definition. You could have definition with 100 components and run faster. It's not the number of components but what they are doing. As i said, the surface morph component is very demanding, and will slow down the definition a lot. Try turning on the profiler widget so you can see where the bottleneck is.

I work on a core 2 duo 2.5 GHz laptop with 4 gigs of ram and a very shitty graphics card, and my guess is it's not running much slower than in yours. The only hardware in play here is the GHz of a single core (grasshopper, as most software, is single threaded for now). Part of learning Grasshopper efficiently is to figure out the least cpu demanding method for achieving your result.

Permalink Reply by Massimiliano Trave on October 13, 2010 at 5:48pm

thanks so much I understand what you mean. one more thing but tell me what is the profiler widget?

Permalink Reply by Kamil Kiendzierski on October 13, 2010 at 2:40pm