Daz Studio startup time

tonytriola

Daz Studio 4.7 and Content Manager both seem to take quite a long time to start up, was wondering if this is normal behavior.

In my case, both take about 3.5 to a full 4 minutes. I have read elsewhere that there could be an issue with ZoneAlarm (which I use) not 'playing nice' with Daz (or at least, the database it uses), but other than startup time, haven't had any other issues.

Is this long startup time normal?

mjc1016

tonytriola said:

Is this long startup time normal?

No...

If using Postgre for the content management, and running Zone Alarm, try to exclude all things related to Postgre from ZA (whitelist it).

tonytriola

OK, I whitelisted the following in ZA:
(all, set to 'No Enforcement' and 'Allow' for network/internet I/O).

DAZ3DIM.exe
DAZ3DINHelper.exe
DazContentManagerService.exe
DAZSTUDIO.exe
pg_ctl.exe
postgres.exe

Didn't see anything else related to DS or PGDB (that I recognized), but there's a lot listed in ZA, so I might have missed something.

Startup for DS still took over 3.5 minutes, initially.
I shut down DS, waited a minute and called it again, took about 1.5 minutes the second time around.
Startup for CMS is the same as for DS, so as you say, DB connectivity is most likely the issue.

Could this have something to do with PostgreSQL start-stop behavior? Being on-demand rather than running persistently in the background?

Is there a config setting for postgre?

3WC

You may also want to check where studio is looking for content. I had a content folder mapped that was not on my local machine but on the network. Took a solid minute to 1:30 for studio to load. Once I eliminated that external content location, load times improved dramatically. That may not be the problem for you, but could be.

fixmypcmike

There is a long-standing (since 2009) problem with Zone Alarm and PostgreSQL. Unfortunately, I don't know of any solution that works for everyone.

mjc1016

fixmypcmike said:

There is a long-standing (since 2009) problem with Zone Alarm and PostgreSQL. Unfortunately, I don't know of any solution that works for everyone.

I do...remove Zone Alarm...it has become very bloated over the years. I don't recommend it any longer...and I used to be a very dedicated ZA supporter.

tonytriola

@wwes, fixmypcmike & mjc1016:

Thanks for the tips, I'm aware of the conflicts between postgre and ZA from other posts. I tried 'game-mode' and 'snooze FW for 5 min', but got the same results.

My content path is the default ../MyLibrary in both DIM and DS, so doubtful that has anything to do with it, it's the amount of time it takes either DIM or DS to connect to postgre that seems to be the issue.

I'll next try excluding ZA from auto-start to see if that makes a difference, just to narrow it down and confirm the conflict.

sriesch

FYI, it actually can take a while for DS to start up under certain circumstances in addition to this. I often have to wait quite a while, and it appears to be due to the volume of content (possibly because I chose to map a very large number of separate content folders, although I haven't verified that's the reason.) If I eliminate my content mappings completely, then DS starts up super-fast. This star-up delay is much more pronounced on an older slower PC as well.

tonytriola

I contacted support and was told that even though ZA had been disabled, it's very installed presence would cause slow load time.

I uninstalled ZA and reverted to Window Firewall which fixed the load time problem.

Thanks for all the tips, I'll keep them in mind as I use DS 4.x