Continuous short freezes while working in the Editor

Development World Creation
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21

Something I noticed right now - I got freezes to become less frequent after doing nothing but simply navigating around and turning on that option.

Then I tweaked materials and replaced old materials on some meshes - bam! freeze after freeze to the point deeming UE4 unusable :frowning:

P.S. ~30 min later still having freezes. After I closed Material Editor window freezes significantly subsided.

P.P.S. It feels like 4.13 constantly compiling shaders in the background. Btw, I not longer see a pop-up says and counting shaders when I change materials. It simply applies/saves and the, without any popup it goes into grind.

22

Iā€™ve just encountered almost a minute-long freeze! CPU usage went from ~15-20% to ~40% during freeze, but memory usage stayed at ~60%, no increases here.

PS. That was without launcher opened.

23

Yep, sadly just got a freeze with launcher closed.

24

Bizarre behavior - every 2-3 sec I get 5-10 sec freezes. Itā€™s impossible to work like that :frowning:

Worth mentioning that 4.11.2 was rock solid release - no freezes ever.

25

Disregard all the ā€œpositiveā€ things I said above - I opened project fresh (after restarting PC) this morning as still get constant and continuous freezes. 4.13 is impossible to work with :frowning:

26

One last thing to mention - my DerivedDataCache folder is in my projectā€™s folder (I edited .ini file so itā€™s created where I need for it to be created and not on C: drive) as I am running out of free space on C: drive (where UE4 places DerivedDataCache folder by default).

Not sure if it makes any difference, but I figured itā€™s something worth mentioning.

27

Hmm, I have over 30 GB left on C: and still get the freezes. By the way, Iā€™ve noticed that the editor tends to freeze pretty hard if we e.g. minimize it, go browsing web for ~5 min and then go back to editor. In my case it sometimes takes a 10-20 seconds to un-freeze and get back to usable state. This wasnā€™t happening in e.g. 4.11, as I remember.

PS. Just freezed for ~15s. after just selecting Spline component in blueprint.

28

Why is this marked as resolved?!

29

Not even sure what DDC stands for. I am working on 1 PC, no other PCs networked with it (and I donā€™t have any other PCs).

30

This type of behavior can possibly occur if the drive that your DDC is located on has a lot of read/write activity. You can use our DDC Docs to try and move your DDC to a new location. This will cause hitches as you work if you donā€™t pre-build your DDC, so use the build commands in the Docs.

I suspect whatā€™s happening is that youā€™re experiencing hitches whenever the engine has to compile something new and store it in the DDC. The behavior when this happens would be a hitch when first loading an asset, then it no longer hitches for that asset after that.

31

In my case I donā€™t use any DDC, single local PC machine, only me.

32

From the docs, ā€œPass -ddc=noshared on the command lineā€ - how do we do that if we run engine from Launcher and not from cmd line or shortcut ?

33

Hey motorsep,

Here is a doc that will show you how to run the editor through the command line: Running Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine Documentation

34

So, I probably should have worded that better, but DDC is the exact thing you mentioned in your previous commentā€¦Derived Data Cache.

The DDC essentially this(from the doc I linked):

The Derived Data Cache (DDC) stores versions of assets in the formats used by the engine and its target platforms, as opposed to the source formats artists create that are imported into the editor and stored in .uasset files. Content stored in the DDC is disposable in that it can always be regenerated at any time using the data stored in the .uasset file. Storing these derived formats externally makes it possible to easily add or change the formats used by the engine without needing to modify the source asset file.

So, what this sounds like, to me, is that youā€™ve updated your project from 4.12 to 4.13. There are a lot of custom shaders/textures/assets that you worked on and developed in 4.12. As you created these assets, they were compiled and stored in the 4.12 DDC (found here: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\UnrealEngine\4.12\DerivedDataCache).

After updating to 4.13, all of your custom assets are not a part of the 4.13 DDC. So, if you donā€™t ā€œBuildā€ the assets in that project with the build command found in the docs, then itā€™s going to do it one at a time as you load each asset in your project. In turn, this causes the editor to freeze while it caches that asset.

So, you were asking how to launch from the command line. This is how to build the DDC in 4.13 for your project.

  1. Open CMD
  2. Locate the UE4Editor.exe file in ā€œProgram Files (x86)\Epic Games\4.13\Engine\Binaries\Win64ā€
  3. Drag the exe into the CMD window
  4. Add a space
  5. Locate your .uproject
  6. Drag it into the CMD window
  7. Add a space
  8. Type -run=DerivedDataCache -fill
  9. Hit Enter
  10. Go get coffee
  11. When itā€™s finished, try opening your project again.

If you still get freezes, let me know and weā€™ll go from there.

35

So, as youā€™ve stated, itā€™s pointing to a DDC in your project folder. Can you send me the ini file where you made that change?

36

This is the file I edited: Google Drive: Sign-in

Did the same for 4.11.2 btw and didnā€™t have this issue with freezing.

37

Sorry I wasnā€™t clear - I know how to use cmd line :wink:

I wanted to add the argument, somehow, so I could still run Editor from Launcher, but it would be launched with -ddc=noshared (from the Launcher, not cmd)

38

Interesting development - I ran the engine with -ddc=noshared and it took a while to load, had all the shaders compiling and stuff.

So far itā€™s not freezing unless LODs on models get swapped.

Iā€™ll work in it more and report back.

39

Iā€™ve been monitoring disk read/wrtie activity during freezes. There was none coming from UE4 / Launcher affiliated processes. Only a CPU usage spike.

40

Have you tried running Editor with -ddc=noshared ?

It sort of solved freezes for me, but not 100% sure yet. The problem with that (and I havenā€™t messed with working with materials yet) was that when I applied new material to a static mesh, it took forever to appear and Editor was choppy. So I had to disable "show folder"in content browser, select all assets there and right click on them to load. Took a while, including compiling 9,000+ shaders.

So I am not sure whether I have to do this nonsense every time I start engine with -ddc=noshared or if it was one time thing.