I'm wedging caches into a rop geometry output, rendering in rop mantra render nodes, and then compositing them using rop composite output.

I find it's fairly stable when I'm writing out fresh files, but if there are existing files to read (if the hip crashes and I restart halfway through) houdini immediately freezes when reading the files in. I've been trying to use different schedulers to limit the cpu usage/memory ect, but my intuition tells me that it's the high cpu process of reading 10,000+ files at once using 100% of my cpu that's crashing houdini.

I've disable "core performance boost" in Bios as I've read that's an issue with threadrippers, but it doesn't seem to help. Also setting the scheduler to "single job" doesn't help as I'm guessing that's only for processing jobs not actually reading them in.

Please if there is something I'm missing here I would really appreciate it!

Specs
CPU - Threadripper 3970X 32-Core
Ram - 128 Gb

not sure if it's gonna help but there is this folder you can move to the read node.
might help in combination with frames per batch?