Undo queue thrashes HDD!

[ajz3d]

When I was working on my alien from the 2nd challenge, I noticed that upon reaching a certain point in vertex texturing, some operations resulted in serious hard disk thrashing, which kept interrupting user's input devices like mouse or tablet. I checked the resource monitor for some clues and found out that the disk thrashing came from 3D Coat's write operations performed by undo queue in %USERPROFILE%\3D-Coat-V4\Undo directory. While most of the undo files stored there weren't that big (a couple of megabytes at most), there were few over 2,5 GB. After further inspection it turned out that those files stored information returned by Paint layers context menu->Freeze Painted Pixels. The more information the layer held, the longer and more severe the thrashing was. Also, Freeze->Invert Freeze/Selection resulted in the same disk usage. My final sculpture oscillates around 50M polygons (I know it's a total overkill, but I wanted to keep sculpture's high resolution in case I needed it in voxel painting) and I understand that this is a lot of information to process, especially if a layer that I freeze has the most coverage when compared to other. What I don't understand though, is the fact that I still had 24GB of free random-access memory available and the whole Undo directory contained only about 7.5GBs of information, so it could easily fit into RAM with a big reserve still remaining. This would save a lot of my HDD's lifespan.

 

I remember someone once asked for an option to customize 3D Coat's path. If implemented, this would allow people to direct the program to some cheap replaceable, high speed/low capacity SSD and store all of its queue/temp/config files there. This would be the solution to the problem described above, but unfortunately according to my knowledge it was never implemented.

 

The other solution I can think of is to allow users to define the maximum amount of RAM which can store undo information. So it the queue would go there instead of directly sending the queue item to HDD.

[Carlosan]

0001045: Add an option in preferences to select which path is wanted for user folder

http://3d-coat.com/mantis/view.php?id=1045