Helicon Soft Forum

I see there are supposedly some multi CPU performance enhancements in 6.6.0 - but it killed performance for me on my 6 core Xeon Mac Pro. CPU runs 1000% (most of that is kernel time). It takes approximately 10 times as long to render a DNG stack. During this time my mac is very unresponsive.

There were lots of changes between 6.5.2 and 6.6.0. More than one might have contributed to this issue.
Here are two variations of the program. Can you please see if they behave the same or differently?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_uKrE ... sp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_uKrE ... sp=sharing

Nope both behave pretty much the same - 10 seconds between images, whereas 6.5.2 takes 3 seconds. This is with DNG in DNG out.

Then I have no idea what might have caused it.
Could you please see if there's a difference between 6.5.2 and 6.6 when processing JPEGs?

Sure. With Jpeg images 6.6 is only about 10% slower than 6.5.2 with jpeg.

With DNG 6.6 is about 1000% slower than 6.5.2.

See graph below. The left part is 6.6 rendering 33 x 20MP Jpeg images. Notice the system CPU usage (red). On the right, it shows 6.5.2 rendering that same stack (i ran it twice to eliminate disk reads / caching). Note the lower system CPU usage (red) and higher actual application CPU usage (blue) meaning it is doing more actual work and less system calls. Maybe that helps?

So far we can't say what's wrong, but since it has to do with raw files, I would suspect the raw decoder. Which decoder/converter do you use? Either way, switch to a different one (e. g. DCRAW <-> Adobe DNG).
Also, try this new version: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_uKrE ... sp=sharing

Why? I am using Adobe's DNG converter and it works perfectly on 6.5.2. I am not willing to switch to a different RAW converter - I'd rather stick to 6.5.2 for the rest of time

I stacked with 6.6.1 and 6.5.2 using DNG. For 6.6.1 the stack took 5:39. For 6.5.2 it took 4:23, thus 28% slower. See CPU below - left is for 6.6.1, right is for 6.5.2.

I must also note that during the 6.6.1 rendering, the Helicon Focus UI was completely frozen (beachball). With 6.5.2 it was not and I could perform various other tasks in Helicon Focus while it was rendering.

Yes, I realize you were using the same DNG converter for both Focus versions.
Thanks for the information, we'll give it further thought.