I’ve been using darktable for last few years and did not have this problem earlier. Of course with newer version, resource expectation of darktable could have increased.
My laptop is 3 years old, 16 GB ram, i-7. A decent machine. Recently, mostly for last 6 months, so before current release came out, I am noticing significant increase in duration of “working” message. Sometimes changes take as long as ten seconds or more while using filimic or color balance RGB.
Hard disk has more than 50% space available or roughly 400GB. Swap is rarely getting used. Hard disk is not SSD.
My observations using top command indicate while I have CPU usage for darktable, “wa” time is also significant and goes down when darktable finishes the operation. I do remember facing similar problem for Ubuntu 20.04 on my work machine - not this laptop. System will become very slow and wa time will be very high while sometimes it felt like CPU was not at all busy.
Is it time to upgrade? What hardware do you recommend or use?
What is the cpu speed and model i7 in your laptop. Does the hardware need to be a laptop? Do you utilize laptop GPU? What is the cost of your current system and what is your price range.
To me your laptop is on the low end, possibly great for word processing or light spreadsheet work. Also might be good to hold on to as a remote terminal.
Speed is 2.7 GB. I prefer a laptop. The opnencl options are checked in darktable. As it’s older machine, cost is meaningless right now.
As far as I know HP envy series - my current laptop is one of the better consumer grade laptop. Its not very fancy, but when I purchased it, 8 GB was standard in consumer laptops.
2.7 i7 with 8-16 is really really going to be an under-performer, even three years ago. We want to know the model to see how many parallel cores you are dealing with. I wouldn’t look at less than 4.2GHz Octocore with minimum 32GB RAM, and minimum 1TB solid state mass storage.
I don’t think your machine is too slow at all. I sometimes use dt on my 4core intel i5 notebook, no problem and definitely a faster dt than 2 years ago.
I strongly suspect your opencl system isn’t up&running correctly. Search this forum or look into the manual about “how to check for opencl”. First thing though would be, try clinfo and see everything is ok. Also might be a non-native-app issue like snap or …
In my opinion it’s a good idea to run a benchmark, with and without OpenCL enabled. On my AMD Ryzen 4800H laptop (without a dedicated GPU) the benchmark runs slower with OpenCL than without OpenCL.
I used this page for speed comparisons with the arecibo.orf image and the relating xmp file: GPU benchmarks in darktable
CPU only:
darktable-cli setubal.orf setubal.orf.xmp test.jpg --core --disable-opencl -d perf
CPU + GPU, using OpenCL:
/opt/darktable/bin/darktable-cli setubal.orf setubal.orf.xmp test.jpg --core -d perf -d opencl
For reference, my system scores 32.7293 sec with opencl and 107.1577 sec on CPU only (the lower the better) and I consider my system is old for darktable and it’s kind of limping when editing 24mpx RAWs from my a7 to the point when I think that me knowing my way around the software is part of what makes me able to use it in these conditions.
My system is a I5-4570 (4x3.4Ghz) - 16Gb DDR3 1600MT - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 - Raw files stored on HDD but this test was ran from my SSD
I want to thank everyone. I think I’ve managed to solve the problem thanks to various comments here. Time will tell, but currently it seems to be moving very fast.
Apparently my laptop has two graphics cards, built in intel and nvidia. For whatever reasons, nvidia card was not activated by Ubuntu. This is to say output of command sudo lshw -C video was showing as unclaimed.
Upon investigation, I figured out I have to install nvidia drivers. Did install appropriate drivers and now it flies.
I don’t think I have seen darktable so fast in recent days.
Yep, I suspected that 4GB of vram was not enough, I’ll try to land a good deal on a new GPU and buy a 2TB SSD as these 2 components will be able to transition to my new system when I’ll be ready for the “big upgrade”