Speed up I/O when using cached simulations I'm experimenting with fluid sims, so I've been baking and rendering the whole day. One thing I've noticed is that the I/O seems to be really slow. Like really slow. I'm only rendering at 30 samples per pixel and denoising, and when rendering an animation, it takes a couple of seconds to render the frame, then it hangs, I'm assuming reading the cache from the disk, and resumes the render. Guys I'm not kidding, the reading from the disk is twice the time it takes to render the frame. I'm on a SSD and every baked frame in the cache, between the actual sim and the noise sim (I'm working with fire at the moment) is around 35mb, so it should be very quick to load... And yet.
Also the timeline performance is afwul, scrubbing on the timeline is basically impossibile if the cache is active, I have to remove it and the reload it if I want it to be workable.
I only have 16GB of RAM, so I know I won't be able to do gigantic sims, but at the moment blender is only using 1.2GB of RAM during rendering.
Is there a setting I'm missing? IS there a way to I don't know, load more of the cache in RAM or something to speed things up?
Edit: Blend file https://we.tl/t-RCntPkgsnu it's really just a test scene
ok, although this is not an answer to your question, but i think it is important that you understand what is going on in fluid/smoke simulations.
First there is the domain, in which the whole simulation is going on. So every piece of smoke of fluid must be inside of this.
It &quot;normally&quot; makes no sense to move or animate the domain at all (from my point of view). So why are you animating the domain?
Inside the domain you can use inflows or geometry, which is the &quot;real&quot; smoke or fluid which then will be animated inside the domain.
You can imagine the domain as something, which is the world of fluids and all fluids can only live inside of that.
So my first advice: do not animate or move the domain at all. I never made it and maybe i am wrong - but i don't think it is a good idea to move it at all.
Move the inflows or your fluid inside the domain.
Maybe just changing this will solve your lagging problems. If not, just update your .blend file without moving the domain or explain me, what do you want to achieve by moving the domain?