Speeding up Blender .obj import

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Style Pass

2022-05-13 20:30:08

A while ago I wrote about speeding up Blender’s Wavefront OBJ exporter. All that landed into Blender 3.2. And since that was quite a nice experience, I started to look into the OBJ importer…

Blender 3.1 and earlier has an OBJ importer written in Python. From a quick look, it was written “ages ago” and has largely unchanged since then. I’m going to test it on several files:

Test numbers are from my Windows PC, Blender built with Visual Studio 2022 in Release mode, AMD Ryzen 5950X (32 threads), PCIe 4.0 SSD. Times are seconds that it takes to do a full import.

Four hours for the splash scene does sound excessive! I suspect it runs into some “other” bottleneck than pure calculations – the memory usage quickly grows to 20GB during import, and then stays there, with CPU usage not even fully utilizing one core. The machine does have 64GB of memory though; it’s definitely not swapping. Quick profiling just shows all the time inside some Python DLL without debug symbols. Maybe Python decides to, for example, run the garbage collector after each and every allocation, once it reaches “some” amount of allocated memory? I’ve no idea.

During Google Summer of Code 2020, there was a project to rewrite OBJ exporter & importer in C++. The exporter part had just been finished and landed into Blender 3.1 (which I’ve further optimized for Blender 3.2, see previous blog post).