Reply To: Slate editor is very CPU heavy?

[dgoyette]

Was there ever any insight into this?

To be specific about the concern, there are two main ways in which Slate will use what seems like an enormous amount of CPU resources for what it’s doing. This is very easy to see if you use the Profiler, profiling the editor, or even just looking in the Task Manager and noting the CPU usage. You’ll see performance issues either when 1) The Cutscene window is open, or 2) Just having the Cutscene selected (with the Inspector showing) results in huge CPU usage.

The simplest test case is to create a new scene. Close any Game Views or Scene Views you have open. In this state, the Unity editor sits at around maybe 1% of my CPU usage when Unity is focused. And pretty much 0% when Unity is minimized.

Now add an empty game object, and add a Cutscene to that game object. Open the cutscene. The CPU usage now goes up to a steady 30% usage. This does NOT go down if you minimize Unity.

Now close the Cutscene window, but keep the Cutscene gameobject selected in the inspector. CPU usage again goes up to about 30%, just having the cutscene selected in the Inspector, without even having the window open. Again, this CPU usage stays high even when Unity is minimized.

This CPU usage appears to have nothing to do with the complexity of the cutscene. Again, in this test case, the cutscene was empty. I even deleted all of the tracks, and still the CPU usage spikes.

I’m not sure if there’s some editor code that’s running every frame that should only be running once, or only run when something changes? But it’s definitely gotten to the point where I’m very careful to close the Slate window, and select something else in the editor, to avoid having my CPU times climb, unless I’m actively editing a cutscene. This isn’t the end of the world, but it would be nice if this turned out to be some simple thing.