Ever since the past couple of weeks, I have noticed Houdini feeling sluggish and instancing new nodes taking a couple of seconds.

I am using Houdini 18.0.391 in OSX Catalina 10.15.3, but I have been using Houdini for years and never noticed any issue like this.

My first thought is – what has changed in the past two weeks? Well, my Indie license expired (have been planning to renew but I got busy on another project), so I am currently using Apprentice. Is it possible that for some reason Apprentice is more sluggish in instancing new nodes than Indie?

I don't know what else could be causing this. I tried getting rid of any extra Houdini Packages like SideFX Labs or MOPs, the .env file is pristine. Basically I've done everything short of uninstalling and re-installing Houdini.

I was wondering if anyone else is experiencing a similar behavior?

Ok, it appears that the delay in instancing nodes is due to Houdini “evaluating python”

Does anyone know what might possibly be going on? I swear this never happened before.

Is the software stored onto a NAS that is overloaded? This is the main cause of slowdowns in my experience.

I've experienced a similar performance degradation on MacOS 10.14.15, though 10.15.3 seems to be a bit better. Ended up downgrading to Houdini 18.0.348, which still runs normally.

Not running on a LAN, it's all local on a pretty speedy m.2 drive.

Installed and running 18.0.348 and it's decisively snappier and speedier.

I'm going to file a bug report since this is obviously non-standard functionality with the latest production build.

I'm noticing the same behavior on both Windows 10 and macOS 10.15.3 since updating to 18.0.391. Just navigating around the scene view and network view is laggy. I recorded a quick video of trying to rotate around the viewport and it sticks for a second before catching up. This happens constantly.

I'm seeing the same thing

Did any of you log a bug for this?

I did, but no harm if it comes from more than one source, particularly if it's affecting Windows users as well, or OS X users in an older version of the OS.

I filed a bug too. Support recommended installing the latest daily build and that seemed to fix it for me.

I was told the same thing, but Houdini 18.0.400 still has a noticeable lag when creating certain nodes. The “evaluating python” message still displays sometimes for as long as 3 seconds before the node is created. Houdini has always seemed very responsive, even on a slower machine. Instancing new nodes was practically instantaneous. I'm testing on two separate OSX machines and it's happening on both.

So it would appear that the issue I was encountering was only happening in Houdini Apprentice. Indie seems to be fine.