Hey All,
Just doing some cleaning up of some VDB source file sequences. Just removing a weird channel that is causing problems when rendering.  The issue arises that it's taking way longer than I would expect for Houdini to process this.

Basic pipe is:
File Read VDB in -> blast (to remove unwanted channel) -> fileCache (to get clean VDB)

The source file averages about 11MB.
The destination file is about the same.

Takes about 30 min to process one sequence of 400 frames.  The whole time there is almost no activity on any of the threads on the machine and the IO is minimal as well.

So thinking that I have some available overhead that I can use, I decided to use the "Save to Disk in Background" button and then see if I can multithread it since I have about 12 of these sequences to go through.

Now they take much longer per a sequence (1 hour 20 min) to do and still almost no action on the threads or IO...

Is there something I'm missing or is it really this slow?

Cheers,
CJ

On our work machines i have found a network write of a VDB, it streams to the server in small increments slowing it down in a big way. writing locally then moving it is faster. i may roll this into our cache node or look for a environment variable to solve the problem

Have you tried adding:

HOUDINI_BUFFEREDSAVE = 1

...to your env file?

It made a huge difference for me when saving to a network drive- both file saves and file caches.