[Request] - GUI Thread Control

[WytRaven]

I was thinking today about how things are going to change for me and my rendering habits once I purchase an 09 Mac Pro and it occurred to me that I will quite likely often be rendering on 6 or 7 cores whilst leaving some headroom for normal computer use. This is something that isn't really possible (aside form lowering indigo's priority) on my current dual core.

Please give serious consideration to a dynamic threading system for future indigo releases. Right now we have to set number of threads at start of render and stop-edit-resume if we want to change the number of threads.

Personally I think a simple addition to the GUI allowing number of threads to be adjusted at any time would be a useful feature for everyone. Perhaps a simple combo box populated with number of processors reported by OS (which for the 09 octo Mac Pros would 1 to 16) would be all that is required allowing you to redistribute processing power at will.

The idea being that if I start a render with threads = 16 I can later change to 15 and the currently running 16th thread will run to completion on its current "work unit" then halt.

Now not being familiar, obviously, with the guts of indigo I'm not sure if this is a big or small request but my shallow understanding of multi-threading in rendering apps leads me to believe this should be well outside the "too hard" basket.

Comments? Support? Nay-sayers? Let us know what you think.

[fused]

+1

a collegue just got the new octo Mac Pro and if i occupy his machine with indigo im sure he'd want to be able to turn indigo down to be able to work (because in osx you cant set the process priority).

[carbon]

to suspend

Code: Select all

killall -SIGSTOP Indigo

to resume

Code: Select all

killall -SIGCONT Indigo

should work.. in theory, not tested

[fused]

heh, guess it would be easier to press the pause button in the gui then, eh?

[pixie]

There's programs which enable you to define the priority trough a GUI

[fused]

...
...

i was trying to bring an argument where such a feature is useful/needed and you guys come up with solutions for a yet imaginary problem (due to the lack of a working mac version of indigo).


so you two dont need this feature?

edit: btw, dont take this post too serious, thus the smilies

[pixie]

IMO is needed as not all have it, but not only in OSX in Windows too. Whenever I start indigo in 64bit (since process tamer doesn't work in 64bit) my system crawls, if I am not able to manually switch to low priority that is...

[WytRaven]

I am not talking priority here but altering the number of threads indigo is using. However as I know you can alter priority of threads (under windows at least) in code that would be a welcome addition as well i guess.