[vtk-developers] new pipeline slowness

[Clinton Stimpson]

I just ported one of our applications to use the latest VTK, and it is 
*really* slow due to the new pipeline changes.

I looked back on the mailing list and this came up:
http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/vtk-developers/2004-October/002937.html

I've got a profile (using gprof) showing where the bottlenecks are.
The model I used to generate this profile had very interactive frame 
rates in vtk 4.2, but now it takes over one second per frame.

Anything to do with vtkInformation takes a few pages worth of the 
functions that came out on top in the profile.
std::set<vtkInformation*>::find() came out on top with 6%, followed by 
std::less<vtkInformation*>::operator() with 2.3% and on and on....  (and 
this includes the time to startup the application, load the huge model, 
render 100 times, then shutdown).

I hit interrupt in the debugger while rendering that model, and I was 
surprised how many allocations/deallocations of vtkInformation related 
stuff happens, and how many map looksups occurred.

I've got about 1500 actors to display this cad model (a huge assembly), 
and I've already gone through great lengths to reduce the number of 
actors and make the datasets larger, and I've done as much of that as I can.

What can be done about this?

Thanks,
Clint