Hey All,
My Specs:
AMD Threadripper 7980x with 128 Gb ECC RAM
RTX 4090
Houdini 20.5.348
RenderMan 26.2
Linux Mint 22

When I start Houdini, the system fans ramp like a jet engine until the UI is finished loading, and then things go back to typical noise/fan levels. I am not noticing any load on the CPU/GPU in PSensor. What is happening from the time I click the icon, to the finished UI loading that would make the fans sound like a jet engine? There are no other programs that show this behavior. I know this is a tough question, and not really affecting how Houdini works.. just an annoyance.

Update: I am seeing a huge spike in CPU usage on startup of Houdini... not a scene load, just starting the program. I have been using the machine for a few weeks now and rendering never gets above 60c.. it is a very efficient chip. When I start Houdini, the CPU temps are at 75c. That is the hottest the CPU has ever been. It just seems weird that a program starting is the most CPU usage out of all the things I do on this machine. It is a short spike in usage, but it is annoying, and I am just truly curious to know what is going on?

You could try starting Houdini from the shell using the -profile-startup option like this to see if you can correlate what's happening:
This will give you a bunch of print outs of what's happening during start up and you can try to see what stage is happening when the fan comes on.

Hey Edward,
Thanks for the interest in this case. The ramp up happens at the end of the processes, as the UI comes up. The CPU temps jump from 36c to 73c during the start of Houdini. Once finished loading the UI the temps come back down immediately to 39c. The total time of high temp activity is 14-15secs. The attached file shows when the ramp starts.. as requested.

Thanks again,
Todd

You said the temperature jumps during the "start of Houdini", is that while all that stuff is printed out? Or are you saying all those print outs finish and THEN the temperature jumps? By the time you see the last message, that step has already completed and includes the time taken by all the steps before it.

The stuff prints out and then at the end of the processes (see the circled process)... it ramps up in temperature and fan speeds. The splash screen has already disappeared when the ramp up happens. The UI is fully loaded when the ramp up happens. It only last for about 14-15 secs... then everything is quiet and the CPU has cooled down, and it operates as expected.

have you disabled background help indexing?

Hey jsmack,

That definitely helped. Thanks. Am I losing any functionality disabling indexing... other than the obvious performance of using the help system? It still ramps up but not nearly as badly. Thanks again guys for the help.

TheNotepadShow
Hey jsmack,

That definitely helped. Thanks. Am I losing any functionality disabling indexing... other than the obvious performance of using the help system? It still ramps up but not nearly as badly. Thanks again guys for the help.

I haven't noticed any downsides.