[Bf-committers] Python + Many Objects = slow!

Chris Want bf-committers@blender.org
Mon, 03 May 2004 19:32:30 -0600


Bear with me, I don't usually write stuff this long, but
I would just like to share some surprising results from a bit
of profiling...

This weekend it was pointed out to me that some changes
I had made to the armature/action/nla code had slowed down the
rendering of animations in blender 2.33 for scenes with many objects
(whether the scene had armatures or not). These slowdowns occur both
when pressing the 'ANIM' button or through Alt-A.

Indeed, a simple test file with  4096 planes, one lamp, and one
camera yields the following render times in various versions
of blender:

blender-2.23: Saved: /tmp/render/0004 Time: 00:00.79
blender-2.25: Saved: /tmp/render/0004 Time: 00:00.86
blender-2.26: Saved: /tmp/render/0005 Time: 00:01.10
blender-2.27: Saved: /tmp/render/0005 Time: 00:01.10
blender-2.29: Saved: /tmp/render/0001 Time: 00:02.03
blender-2.31: Saved: /tmp/render/0003 Time: 00:01.88
blender-2.32: Saved: /tmp/render/0001 Time: 00:04.87
blender-2.33: Saved: /tmp/render/0001 Time: 00:07.61

Ton and Rob hinted at where the slowdown was -- a dumb piece of
slow code that should have only been run for armatures, but was
instead being run for every object in the scene.

Limiting the execution of the code to only armatures yields
a really nice speedup for this scene:

Current CVS:  Saved: /tmp/render/0001 Time: 00:01.87

By 'smarten-ing up' one line of code, we have a 450%
performance increase!

But this isn't the end of the story: we are still rendering
at half the speed of blender 2.23! So I decided to
investigate further ...

Doing some profiling in the scene yields that the code is now
spending most of it's time in GetObjectByName() from the file
source/blender/python/api2_2x/Object.c. This function gets called
by setScriptLinks() from the file
source/blender/python/api2_2x/EXPP_interface.c,
which in turn is called by BPY_do_pyscript() from
source/blender/python/BPY_interface.c -- but
my scene with 4096 planes does not have any
scriptlinks!

To confirm that this is a source of slowness, I made the first 
executable line of code in BPY_do_pyscript() a 'return' statement
-- the rendertime I get now is:

modified cvs: /tmp/render/0017 Time: 00:00.35

Now we are double the speed of blender 2.23!

Anyways, I hope this profiling information will inspire
somebody on the python team to 'smarten up' the code
that evaluates script links. (Maybe when ANIM/Alt-A is
first pressed create a list of scripts that need to be run
every frame, rather than figuring it out every frame?)

Chris