Houdini notes / tips — Improving file cache SOP node performance

File cache node is often used to cache some heavy computation output and load it later on as input to downstream node for better performance. But during my usage of this node I noticed that even loading the caches can have some performance penalty. Consider the example below, after running performance monitor it looks Houdini is taking 32.2% of the time (35.8s) reading the file node, and only 63.5% of the time (1m10s) spent for solving the simulation, and that’s not desirable. After looking further into the node options, I found these:

The default setting for a file cache node is like this : 

Advanced tab

• Cache Frames : 0

• No Pre-fetch Geometry

And after changing the settings to:

• Cache Frames : 10

• Pre-fetch Geometry : True

The performance increase significantly now with the file cache node only takes 0.2% of the total time (0.12s) .