Unity — torpid performance

None of my Unity projects are particularly heavyweight (most are mobile). I've been away from Unity development for almost a year and recently upgraded to Unity 4, and I'm finding that Unity takes forever just to launch and is unresponsive for a long time. What the heck?

Unity 3.5.x used to launch with these same projects almost instantaneously. I've tried 4.0.1f2 and 4.1.2 and they're both — well torpid would be an insult to torpid things.

E.g. clicking on the console tab causes a beach ball and about 20s of delay before anything happens.

I'm running a Macbook Pro 2010. Activity Monitor never shows more than about 30% CPU load. Am I doing something terribly wrong?

 

I've come to notice this a lot recently as well. Unity 4 is very noticeably slower than Unity 3.

 

Yeah, I've been noticing this a bit as well on a big multiple gigabyte project, especially on windows in particular. For some reason windows seems to have a lot more massive delays, but both still get as bad as having a second long delay to select things at times. Hopefully this will be addressed.

 

Not having this, but I've been doing very low-weight projects recently.

 

Unity has become much slower for me also, when recording it starts to lag, which never happened with 3.x. The asset store has become a useless piece of crap as I'm scared to open it anymore due to weird glitches and freezes. Multiple bug reports sent and no fixes as of yet.

 

While your comments are depressing, my problems are far beyond this. I left the project to finish "importing small files" for several hours and when I get back it's still beach ball city. The application does respond to events, but it's glacial.

 

Just curious if everyone having this issue is a Mac user. I use Windows and don't have any performance issues at all.

 

I use windows 8, Unity 4 acts the same as Unity 3 for me.

 

It may be an issue with 10.8.3. I'm not using that, and Unity 4 is at least as fast as Unity 3 here.

--Eric

 

Win 7 32b. No difference between 3 and 4.

 

I'm using 10.8.3 (and yes, I'm a Mac user). The behavior of Unity 4.1.2 is completely unacceptable. I just tried creating a brand new project using only a few Unity-supplied packages and the problem remains. I'm going to try installing 4.1.2 on my Mac Pro and see if the problem is peculiar to my MBP (I can't imagine Unity shipping a product this broken…)

 

I'm on 10.7.5 and Unity 4.0.1 and Unity is much slower that 3.5.X.

 

So 4.1.2 runs just fine on my Mac Pro 2012 (24GB of RAM). I still have no clue what's causing problems on my MBP so I bugged it.

 

MBP 10.8.2... The speed is about the same for me, it does launch faster than before though. But the performance degrades after about an hour of use. Starts to slow, lose the ability to undo and the inspector starts to get wonky. (can't enter values, doesn't show the correct item, stuff like that). I have just got in the habit of quitting and relaunching about every hour. Annoying, but not too horrible.

 

I'm not griping about Unity leaking memory or being a little bit sluggish compared to some earlier version, I'm talking about 4.0.2 and 4.1.2 being so slow as to be utterly unusable on a maxxed out 2010 Macbook Pro that isn't running anything else, even when editing an empty project.

 

I'm still on 3.5.x as I have no reason at the moment to upgrade.
Yet after installing Win8 64-bit the startup time of Unity has been noticably slower. Sometimes it takes a minute before the 'choose project' screen appears.

 

Weird. You've tried all the usual stuff right? Permissions, disk repair, etc? I just upgraded my MBP and prior to that I was a on 2009 model and 4.x ran fine. Especially if you are having problems with an empty project. Sounds like something deeper like a an errant process or maybe something. Have you looked at the system console when it open to see if there are errors or warning firing off?

 

I have looked at the console. It doesn't seem like anything terrible is wrong. (Unity isn't crashing — it's just running very, very slowly). I don't see how disk permissions would do this, but it's a thought so I kicked off a verify after reading your post. I'm may try some radical stuff (e.g. I may reboot the computer ZOMG!!!)

 

I had some problems with permissions in the past with another app (either Flash or Flex), where it didn't have permissions to write to some log in the system, but it wasn't enough to actually kill the app and didn't throw and error, but it just kept trying over and over (every few seconds), and was bogging things down. I had even done a full reinstall. By chance I found thousands of these in the console. I ran fix permissions, and the problem was solved.

It probably won't solve your problem, but I always start with quickest stuff first now (permissions, disk repair and zapping the PRAM), just to get that stuff out of the way. Sometimes, it works and I don't need do anything too radical.

 

Upon closer inspection, I am seeing repeated messages along this line in console:

...Windowserver: reenable_update_for_connection: UI updates were forcibly reenabled by application "Unity" after 1.03 seconds (server re-enabled them after 1.00 seconds).

I've tried everything. Everything else is running fine, Unity is garbage.

 

Another thread on this topic:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/17...e-to-4-1/page2?p=1221000&posted=1#post1221000

 

I dunno, I've had the exact opposite problem from you guys. 3.5 always took forever to open...sometimes I could speed it along by opening a browser window after I had double-clicked on the unity icon. Unity4 and 4.1 open near instantaneous for me (windows vista 64bit).

 

No difference here either on OSX 10.7.5 or if then U4 loads faster than U3

 

No complaints here with Unity 4 on Mac OS X 10.8.3. Didn't notice any significant difference in GUI responsiveness between 3.5 and 4.

 

I believe they said this was an issue with Macs running 10.8.3 and Nvidia graphics, and that they're working with Apple on it. The engineer responded in this thread: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/177481-Unity-suddenly-sluggish-on-MacBook-Pro-(2010)

 

The problem is related to the profiler with certain nVidia graphics cards and 10.8.3. Once I turned off the profiler (which is quite painful to do in slow motion) Unity returns to being wonderfully responsive. Very annoying though — I tend to "live" in the profiler