Multiple 3ds Max instances open + Saving = Lag

[DGTLTWNS]

Hi,

I have a few reports of people with 3ds Max 2020, 2022, 2023 (haven't tested 2021) slowing down our workstations, when multiple instances of 3ds Max are open and (auto)saving.

I have recorded a video of this here: https://youtu.be/zzsiOCMhHr8

First part of the video is me saving with only one instance open. Second part (00:18) is with a second file open in another instance. As you can see my workstation grinds to a halt and my cursor is barely moving. It seems I'm not the only one. This started happening a couple of months ago. Maybe a Windows update caused this or something. I looked at my Windows 10 update history in the last half year and most of them are .NET updates.

Can people with the same experience confirm, and could Autodesk investigate this please, because this is super annoying.

Thank you.

[darawork]

Hi,

I'd personally like to try out i9s and Maybe even an AMD Threadripper (when someone fixes their integration between AMD and MAX). But for the last few years I've only being working on Dual Xeons, something to do with parity floating bit architecture, and loads of error checked cores/ per die. They won't ever burn the office down (like Quadro RTXs too, restricted cycles). But when it comes to leaving a workstation run at full heat for two weeks rendering an animation in 4k, on a CPU based render engine (Corona 9), it makes sense from a fire safety point of view that we go with Xeons and Quadro Cards. Maybe it's paranoia, or maybe it's just because it always just works.

Apparently, a lot of system crashes are a result of the Big Bang, believe it or not... there are Free Radicals flying out from the centre of our known universe, wizzing through everything, straight through it, RAM Chips and all. Sometimes those Free Radicals can actually wipe a "1" to a "0" in it's Binary state. This causes software crashes. Big Banking uses RDRAM which has a parity floating bit, to make up for any lost or missing bits.

https://www.dell.com/en-ie/outlet
They're Built In Ireland 🙂 

Regards,

[RobH2]

I tried dual Xeon's for awhile and for the cost, I couldn't see the advantage over a very fast single processor. I wasn't worried about fires or from free radicals zipping through and flipping bits, but they were just never as fast as I wanted them to be considering the cost. Once I went back to the new generations of single processors, I started getting excited about benchmark results again. 

My 3950X has been very impressive, until, well, this Max issue started. I hope someone from Autodesk sees this thread and takes us seriously. I know it won't be a quick fix but someone needs to look into it. Max generates 95% of my livelihood and it's really causing me problems right now. 

[Diffus3d]

Just a reminder... the more of you the submit a support ticket, the more eyes on the issue.  Please do.

Best Regards,

[darawork]

Disclaimer, I don't work for Dell, or Autodesk. But still..

 🙂

[RobH2]

I could read back through this huge thread now but I'll just ask here, for those of you having the worst lags, do any of you "not" have V-Ray installed? In fact, some forums have "Polls." Maybe that's knind of what I'm asking. I'm trying to implicate or eliminate V-Ray because that's where I see the lag. But, if some of you are lagging and don't have V-Ray, that's important information to consider. 

[gandhics]

The challenge for this issue is that there seems no consistancy nor repro step.

Even for max version, if you check this thread, some users are reporting this issue in 3dsMax 2021.

So, why it was ok in your 3dsMax 2022 and not 2023?

That's hard to answer.

So far, only the common factor I have seen is Threadripper.

Then, again, some of my friend has TR and said they don't have problem.

Could be HW or BIOS?

[darawork]

I've vRay 5 in Work, and Corona 7, Max 2022. Xeon. W11. And there's no lag
saving, well not noteworthy lag. Working with 1gb+ 18M Poly Scene files.
Specs as per signature.

I hope the AMD thing gets sorted out soon, I like AMD chips, even though
I've never used one... they look great on paper, especially for something
like Corona.

Regards,

[RobH2]

One more thing. This is not a fix but it might help. Five or more years ago back when Max and V-Ray could bring any machine to its knees while rendering and then trying to work in another program (remember when that was the norm) I found a program that I still use that helped then, and I believe it still does help a good bit now.

It's called Process Lasso (I don't work for them so this isn't a shameless endorsement...lol...). It's highly configurable but what it does by default without any setup is look at all the processes running and it manages them in a manner that gives resources back to the machine so you can actually be doing something else while all of your processor threads are pinging 100%. It has a reporting feature called "Responsiveness" and it tries to give the machine a near 100% Responsiveness rate, meaning, that while all the processes are running, you still have 100% responsiveness with mouse clicks, looking in Explorer, doing Outlook or doing other mundane things while your render. 

My dual Xeon's used to bog down like there was no tomorrow and from the moment I started using it, I got a lot of relief and was able to work again. Now, a lot of that "bogging" started to go away naturally as the developers attacked the root causes, but I kept using it and still do. I think it does mitigate this current lag issue for me on some level. And if you want to, like I have, you can go "program by program" and specify which processes "not to use" and make it persistent. When I run Max, I disable processes 1 and 2 for everything so Max can have them. One thread said Max relied on those two the most. 

Anyway, this might help some of you. I think it does help me. 

[darawork]

Hi, also just one more thing,

Rob, that sounds like PCI bus stealing and IRQs. I used to mess with that stuff when recording audio with Cubase and Windows '98. Something would always be trying to steal an interrupt request, skip the queue. Resulting in pops and clicks in the audio card. The graphics card was usually trying to steal or share the IRQ. Had to manually tell it to stop. Ha. 

Anyways, Where I worked a few years ago, we had our Autodesk documents and licenses on a remote, secure, warehouse separate from the office. One day they moved warehouses further away from the office, like a few miles away. AutoCad would be pausing like crazy while trying to autopredict commands typed in to the command prompt and opening and saving took absolutely ages. Max wasn't effected, but AutoCad was dying. 

I used Sysinternals Process Monitor (similar to what was mentioned above) to find out what was going on. Adsk was phoning home to our remote documents folders miles down the road, and constantly pinging the licencing server like Kevin McCallister trying to phone his parents. 

Once we moved our /documents and licences local again the whole network sped right up again. 

It might be handy to check "why" and "what" part of the process is slowing everything down. 

https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/tsarticles/ts/7G7Khg7RvxvOo6bJ06SgLf.html

[hellojoea]

I must admit, it's actually quite refreshing to hear that other people are having this problem!

I've just watched the video you posted and it's identical to the issue I've been having for a while now.

I'm not sure I have anything to add to the conversation, I just wanted to add my name to the list of people that are having this problem!

I am running max 2020, with vray 6

PC specs are:

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X

128GB ram

Windows 10

Hoping we can find a solution to this issue

Cheers

[arqrenderz]

I have to  wait ut to 10 minutes to close a 3dsmax file... 2023.3 here

Amd 7950x 128gb ram Gtx 3060

[RobH2]

@DGTLTWNS 

To be fair, the file in that video has nearly 7M verts. That's offiially a heavy file. It may be that when you have files that large open, that you really should only run one instance of Max. It might be just a physical bandwidth issue. 

I work on large files too, sometimes even over 10M verts but I never have a second instance of Max open because I found that things run smoother, but still not as smoothly as a much smaller file. I never considered with a huge/heavy file that if I opened another instance of Max and things slowed down that it was a fault or bug in Max, I just assumed it was because my file was so huge that the machine was maxed out with the one file. 

A more fair test might be to open a file that has under 1M verts and then a second instance of Max. It's likely things will run much better. Max is powerful but it's not limitless and I think it's likely your lag is coming from the fact that you are working on huge files. I don't think I knew that from earlier posts in this thread. 

[hellojoea]

I guess the simple answer to this is that I've had several computers with i7 processors in them and I can open/save/run several versions of Max with huge scenes and there's barely any slow down. Yet the common theme amongst everyone here is the AMD Threadripper, it can't be a coincidence.

It is clearly worse on larger files, and not so bad on smaller files, but the fact it does it at all is very odd, and hugely frustrating. It has changed my workflow entirely, and not in a good way.

[RobH2]

@hellojoea 

Understood, that makes sense. So it's an AMD compatibility issue. I have AMD as well and haven't had Intel for about 5-years. Ok, I see the frustration now. If you don't know better, you don't know better. And, I've haven't had the i7 machines to compare to. 

I'm not sure who will blame whom on this. Autodesk passes the buck to AMD or AMD says, "nope, that's Autodesk's issue to fix." Net result, it might take years to see any action on this one. 

It does make me wonder about something that might be related. An IPR Progressive render running while working in a Max viewport used to be smooth as glass. Now it's a nightmare if you file has over a few thousand polys. It could be related. 

[darawork]

Hi,

Unfortunately this seems to be a common problem with AMD chips. A quick search of Reddit and elsewhere brings up lots of disgruntled AMD users.

There is an official explanation here: https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/3ds-Max-UI-lags-or...

Only the first point seems to me as valid, concerning caching... the rest seems to be just grasping at straws.

Regards,

[hellojoea]

Yeh I can't see any of those "solutions" working. They all seem to be aimed at some sort of issue with specific files, ie corrupted geometry in a particular file, or a rogue script etc. But this problem doesn't seem to be file specific, it happens in all files as soon as you open multiple copies of 3ds max.

Sadly I agree, I think AMD and Autodesk would just bat this back and forth blaming each other.

[DGTLTWNS]

Indeed, as I already posted a couple of post ago. This is ONLY a problem that persists with threadripper users and this has been confirmed by the helpdesk team as well. My case was closed saying I had to disable HT and it would solve my issues. I tried this actually and it didn't even work.

Another thing is, it doesn't have a lot of impact if you're having a heavy file or not, ofcourse it's going to be more apparent with bigger files as these save slower. My files are extremely heavy, but also quite small (rarely exceed 100 MB compressed). Compression also doesn't have any influence, because autosave now works without compression and it still lags like hell. Everything has been updated consistently as well.

Mind you I didn't have this problems when I was using an older version of 3ds Max on my 3970x. So this leads me to believe something changed with a windows update or something changed in the way max opens and saves files that AMD doesn't like. But I have 0 impressions Autodesk is working on this. As my case has been opened since the beginning of this thread and I haven't heard back since. The only way to contact them again even is to open a new case. Which I refuse because it's just a waste of time.

So I'm stuck with 2 powerfull threadrippers that run horribly on 3dsMax. Next machine might be dual xeons again, so hopefully Intel will step up his game and release CPUs that have the same bang for buck. Also 0 problems with other software though...So there's that.

[RobH2]

I hear you. But if I run just one incidence of Max, all is well. Do you not get good performance with just one incidence of Max running? 

What's your workflow when needing multiple incidences of Max open? What are you doing such that you need other incidences going at the same time? Just curious since you can only work on one file at a time. This is a loaded question actually. Depending on how you answer, I might have a good work around for one particular case if it pertains to what you are doing by having multiples of Max running. 

[darawork]

Hi,

Looking more into this, as I was very excited to see Ryzen Threadrippers appear. I was sure fired up to get one. So many cores, it would negate the need for a server farm in some respects. Especially using Corona or vRay CPU rendering.
On paper they look amazing: https://versus.com/en/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x-vs-intel-xeon-gold-6128
Look at the levels of precomputation cache 1,2&3, compared to a Xeon. Threadripper is a beast.

Only then, the dreaded incompatibility posts started to arrive on the boards. I do not know why Intel works better with Autodesk products, over AMD. Or why nVidia are the preferred Graphics card. Probably goes way back. When the user needed a 'Co-processor' to run AutoCad v1 or something. I remember those days, with hardware Dongles Supplied by Autodesk, that had to be plugged into the Serial Bus on the back of your 286 Pentium 2 (Turbo) PC.

If Autodesk wanted to fix this, they would. Could maybe. Running source code below the surface of their product titles, deep coding stuff. But, imagine having to do that when instead you could just ignore it indefinitely? It's a big dirty job to run software on two seperate competing CPU companies, or even two different OS's (Mac, yuk).

In the meantime, if I had bought Threadrippers and these sorts of problems were happing to me, I would be searching tech forums or BIOS chat rooms (?) to see how to fix this. Probably not on the Autodesk forums.

Some companies are running Threadrippers with 3DSMax, sucessful companies. I wonder what their workflow is like, and if they really need to have multiple copies of Max open in the first place. Not saying that you shouldn't, but what would be the alternative approach if it's not currently working as it should through no fault of your own?

https://youtu.be/WC5T7c8WTHo?t=1163 (KDSL, run Threadrippers, 19:20 into the video).

Regards,

[RobH2]

I've been using Max since before it was Max (3D Studio) and until 5-years ago, all Intel. Pentiums mostly, some Xeons and then some i7's. But I switched to AMD and currently Ryzen 9 3950-X. It's a beast and I'm so glad I made the switch. To be honest, the only singular issue I have, is that V-Ray IPR renders are sluggish if they are running when I'm working, even on small files, in the viewport. Didn't used to be that way. But, for all the other places and programs that leverage this great processor, I can tolerate the V-Ray issue, even as Max is what I use to make 80% of my living. 

As to having multiple instances open, I sometimes do and it's when I'm grabbing parts from one file to use in another. I use a script called 'Copitor' that let's me copy a mesh in one file, then switch to another instance of Max and just paste it instead of going the saving and 'Merge' route. Copitor allows you to save 5 or 6 separate items. So, I'll open a Max instance, grab the ones I need and switch to the other instance of Max that I'm working in. I leave that 2nd one in the background though. If things get sluggish, I'll just close that 2nd one and keep on rolling with my single instance of Max. And in all tasks, except IPR renders, Max performs incredibally well with the AMD Ryzen 9. 

I do hope some things get ironed out pertaining to this long thread. But for now, with a little workflow protocol, I'm able to work really, really well with my AMD processor.