Slow Issues with large files

[kbr0125]

Good Afternoon,

Issue with dental lab software, running 3shape 2015. An issue issue I am are having is the extremely long load times and slow rendering when large cases are getting designed.

The specs of the computers are as follows
Intel Xeon Processor
16 - 32 GB of ram
GTX 970 Graphics Card
10k RPM SCSI HDD


Our Server is ran on a virtual machine managed by Vcenter

I have ran limited diagnostics on the computers when they were attempting to open up these files, the CPU / Memory / GPU / Graphics ram / Hard drive do not break 10% of usage.

Is there any configuration modifications or tweaks we can make so the users can do their job and not get the frame stutter when they are actually doing the medication to the designs.

Thank You!

 

[kristian]

The only stutters I've experienced have been related to network usage; autosave in designer and model preview in manager. Have you monitored network usage during these stutters?

 

[CoolHandLuke]

two things are happening here, assuming the software you are running is 3shape.

1. 3shape has never been optimized for >2 cores. so adding more cores is effectively slowing your designing down.

2. 2015 software "merged" the Composer and Scult toolkit, and this again bogs down the CPU because the speed of designing the units depends on how much morphing and sculpting is done in the Sculpt stage; in the smile composer (2014 when it is segregated) none of those smile composer morphs count towards design time. we know this because the re-model or re-build stage does not take the standard library of anatomy and morph it before proceeding to the sculpt stage.

so effectively to enhance your design time, downgrade both computer and software version to a 2-core system ft the best working version of the 2014 software - 2.9.9.5

when designing larger cases it will be beneficial to do them 1/2 at a time, design through the smile composer to the sculpt stage, but SAVE before progressing and then CLOSE.

then open it again and skip to the smile composer stage and all of the morphing done will now no longer be part of the design process in the cpu background.

 

[kbr0125]

Thank you for the great information

From the work stations I have monitored the CPU / RAM / GPU / Disk / Network and I have not seen a bottleneck.

Will now run diagnostic on the server side of things.

 

[kbr0125]

Double Message

 

[kristian]

My setup is similar, in a smaller scale - I have 5 design stations and 2 scan stations and a server/client installation. The server is local, all connected via gigabit network. The only things your server do is look after the database and read/write the working files.

My design computers are lower spec, i7/16Gb with 750Ti to gtx 960's and we don't generally get bogged down by large designs (full arch implant bridges with gingiva, for example).

Opening already designed case takes a while because the changes are stored as steps, not as a 3D mesh of the last design. Re-opening therefore goes through all the design steps, applies all the tools and so forth. Beyond that point, if your memory isn't a bottleneck (it shouldn't be at 16+),it should be pretty smooth sailing.

 

[kbr0125]

Thank you for the help in troubleshooting this software!

I have been running performance monitor on server. I'm waiting for the Hard disk monitor to finish to get a better idea if there is a I/O bottleneck on hard drives.

Going to look into doing NIC teaming.

 

[CoolHandLuke]

if these are networked installations solid state won't affect you much i don't think. the fiber optic lan might, though.

 

[kristian]

if these are networked installations solid state won't affect you much i don't think. the fiber optic lan might, though.

Yeah, SSDs are great for many things but it won't make a difference in a client/server 3Shape setup.

The executable for dental designer is loaded over the network and will run on your workstation memory. The disk usage on client side is next to nothing, but the mem/cpu is all on client side.

Edit: My server runs SSD's though.

 

[kbr0125]

Thank you for the trouble shooting assistance.

Server
Server has plenty of CPU and memory not in use
Iv done a longer monitor of network and it looks as if I have spikes of 90% or more at certain times,

-Hard drives are going up to 300MB/s of usage which is a good chunk. the Latency is above normal levels.

The Client side / workstations
Very little Memory usage
Very little CPU usage.
GPU was running less than 5% of capacity
GDDR5 was under 10% of capacity
Network utilization is under 20% at highest peak

Thank You Again

 

[kbr0125]

Double Post, cant seem to delete.

 

[kristian]

On the client side, how high are individual threads hitting? I assume you have 4-6 physical cores with hyperthreading?

I haven't really looked much into how designer utilizes CPUs and shares workload between them.

I also sent you a PM with my contact info.

 

[smilesatgalleria]

It happens only when your virtual machine getting load high. Try to contact the handler of that virtual machine.

 

[kbr0125]

Yes, 4-8 cores depending on machine, 8-16 when u figure in hyper threading. I do see that only a few of the cores have the spikes but iv only seen it once or twice ever pass the 50% utilization mark.

Sorry for posting here, ill continue in the PM.

 

[kbr0125]

Is any one using a similar setup running the server on a vmware host?

Vsphere esxi 5.1 managed by vcenter.

The vmware doesn't seem to be getting bogged down. I didn't see anything that was alarming so that when I did performance monitor from within the windows machine that is hosted on that vm host.

 

[CoolHandLuke]

there arent many labs that employ such an array of stations. most are 1-3 terminals. you wouldn't happen to be working for Aurum group would you ?

 

[kristian]

3shape has never been optimized for >2 cores. so adding more cores is effectively slowing your designing down.

How dentaldesigner.exe seems to utilize the processor (15.6.0, 64bit) is splitting calculations to more than one thread (on Quad core i7 with hyperthreading and 8 logical cores to 4 threads),but limiting the total processing power usage to same as a single thread would use.

On my logical 8 cores, dentaldesigner utilizes 12.5% of processor at maximum, or the portion of a single core, divided between 4 threads.

I don't think this really hurts anything vs. less cores, but it won't help either. It would look that the best processor to handle the load is the one running at highest speed, whether it's dual core i3 (even Pentium) or 8 core Xeon with Hyperthreading won't do much difference.

It's kind of wasteful, since most of our machines would be capable of working through these cases easily 4-12 times faster if 3Shape would actually tap into the existing resources.