[Paraview] Paraview/pvserver running very slow

[Florian Lindner]

Hello,

I’m running paraview 3.8.1 under linux using 8 cpus loading a 
reconstructed openfoam case with about 13GB per timestep (we have just 
two time steps, start 0 and result 1). The machine on which pvserver 
runs has 16 cpus and 70GB RAM, but pvserver uses just a small fraction 
of the ram.

Loading the case takes about 5 minutes (which would be fine, if 
subsequent operations were running more smoothly).
Adding a slice takes another couple of minutes. Rotating (using the 
mouse) takes about 10sec for one frame to be rendered (the slice is 
constant colored). Computing 100 streamlines from a line source takes 
about 10 minutes, moving the view is fluent. As soon as the slice is 
displayed moving the view becomes extremely slow again.

I have also tried to convert the mesh to VTK which does not really 
change something. (Resulting VTK is of 37GB size).

At this state interactive work is not possible. Since the dataset is 
not extraordinary large (I think), I suspect a problem with our MPI 
configuration.

Offscreen rendering works (I think), we have 8 windows "Visualization 
Toolkit – OpenGL" that opens on the client (though the windows remain 
black).

MPI implementation is SGI MPI. I have also tried to compile openmpi 
1.4.3 and pvserver from source, yet it’s still very slow. The client 
used is the x64 build from the paraview homepage.

MPI setup is for local use only.

I am grateful for any help…

Florian