3dcoat Linux 3.5.07 freezes when saving medium big voxel sculpt files

[renderdemon]

Hi,I found a really annoying and dangerous bug for the linux version.

I'm on ubuntu 10.10 64 bit.

When working with medium/big file size(more than 10 millions voxels,with a 100 or more megabyte size for the file) when you try to save(in particular with "save as") 3dcoat freezes forever,making impossible to save,but much more important,it becomes impossible to avoid an hard reset(I have to turn off the power from the computer as I can't kill the processes in other way,the keyboard and mouse freeze also)

It's really dangerous as I don't want to corrupt files and file system,it happens always when the voxel file is more than 10 millions(it's not related to a particular file,it happens with every medium/big size file).

I think the saving routine maybe uses a lot of memory(I have 8 giga and 4 giga of swap disk space).

On windows operating system a thing like this it never happened,so maybe is related to something particular to Linux,I don't know but I think that 8 giga more 4 giga of swap file should be able to save this amount of geometry(I don't want to save 80 millions geometry file,only between 10/20 as I always did on windows with the same machine)

Thanks.

EDIT:

The moment when 3dcoat freezes is when the program opens the file selector windows to allow the user to choice the name and the path for the file to be saved.

Tried 3.5.06 and 3.5.07 with the same behaviour.

[GeeJay]

Hi!

I am running Ubuntu 10.04 64bit and am not able to duplicate this bug. I've added some primitives, increased to ~13mil and there was no problem saving or loading the file.

Let me know if I can try out something else for you.

[renderdemon]

Hi GeeJay,thanks for the reply.

I don't know,maybe it's my ubuntu(which is 10.10),but it's a fresh one(no more than 10 days).

And also mine it's not a full install with a dedicated partition,but it's installed with wubi, on the ntsf windows partition I allready have.

From my point of view,I can expect maybe some slowness with disk operation(as the linux os it's not on it's own partition) but these crashes I don't think can be related to this(but maybe I'm wrong).

The geometry I don't think eats more than 2/3 giga,I have 8 so I should stay quite in theory.

For now I'll try to stay under 10 millions.

[digman]

Hi!

I am running Ubuntu 10.04 64bit and am not able to duplicate this bug. I've added some primitives, increased to ~13mil and there was no problem saving or loading the file.

Let me know if I can try out something else for you.

I also have no problems using the same Linux version Ubuntu 10.04 64bit. and 3DCoat version linux 3.5.07A 64 bit non-cuda.

So it could be possible to have something to do with the release of 10.10 but just shooting in the dark...

[GeeJay]

I suspect the rather unusual Linux-on-NTFS setup. The NTFS driver, altough reliable, is a hack as far as I know because the specs of NTFS are not public, they were reverse engineered. I might give 10.10 a try in a virtual machine but not before 5th January or something. It sounds like you are ok with this problem and enjoy Linux so try it out some more and if you like it I recommend to do an install to a dedicated partition.

[renderdemon]

Thanks guys for the help.

Of course I know that installing on the ntfs partition it's not the best solution,but it's the easiest and fastest way(probably I'll buy a computer later only for linux)

Anyway,after some more testing I found that I also can increase res and save the sphere primitive(up to 15 millions),I also can save some big files(for example I saved a file with a lot of geometry,31 millions,a sculpt I was doing on windows).

Probably the problem isn't in the file routine(not sure it can be caused by the ntfs file system),but when 3dcoat release resource for other task(like saving and visualizing other windows like the file selector)

For example,with the 31 millions file mentioned above I was able to save but after some minutes I had a freeze suddently when I opened mozilla firefox for looking at the web,so 3dcoat seems wanting to work alone(maybe multiprecessing is too aggressive,I don't know),no multitasking allowed with intensive graphics card work(this seems more the problem).

Previously I always had mozilla opened,not I'll try to not use(better focusing on real work than web surfing!)

bye

[Andrew Shpagin]

During huge file saving 3D-Coat uses multithreading. Disk is slower then memory copying and I am creating additional thread that actually writes to disk.

So actually saving file may take 5-10 sec even durin sculpting. Uually it works very well and safely. But it causes problems in your case.

Probably I will make additional checkbox in Preferences

"Use multithreading to save big files"