Script too long, won't complete

[space9]

Hello,

I'm working on a script that executes a number of iterations of code specified by the user.  I am executing it with a button in a custom gui accompanying the script.  A higher number of iterations will cause the code to take longer to complete, which is fine.  The problem is that if the number of iterations gets too high the code will not complete at all - Maya just locks up and I have to force quit.  There are no errors in the code.

I don't mind if it takes a few seconds or even minutes to complete, I am not trying to make it run faster.  I just want it to actually complete the execution.   

Is there something I can add to allow the code to complete even if it takes a while? 

[joojaa]

Hard to say your not showing us code, several things come to mind

If you have increasing running time then odds are the script will run its course. Thing is we dont know how much slower your code gets each iteration, it could make a dramatic difference. Say if your code is O(n^n) and iteration 10 takes 10 seconds then 11 iteration takes 285311670611 seconds or roughly 9047 years. You dont have to be even so dramatic if your code is O(n^3) again iteration 10 takes 10 seconds but you want to run iteration 100 then suddenly your code already runs for 10,000 seconds or about 3 hours.  O(n^3) is certainly not uncommon in 3d world as is not O(n^4) so sometimes naive code just fails.

Since maya gui is single threaded running your script will block the gui. It ode snot necessarily hang just thet because its blocking the gui nobody knows if its working or if it actually hanged. (that's why the OS does not kill programs like this but suggest they MIGHT have hanged). To see if your script is indeed alive consider putting a progress bar update in your script.

Second you may run out fo undo and memory, try disabling undo.

In anycase its hard to advice as your not sharing your code

[space9]

Awesome, thanks for bringing the progress bar to my attention, I didn't know I could put that in there.

So I added a progress bar and it turns out the code wasn't getting hung up it was just taking a really long time.  What was confusing me was that the time it was taking to complete was increasing exponentially while I was increasing the iterations linearly.   1000 iterations would take about 1 sec, 5000 would take like 20 secs, 10000 would take around 2 min, etc.

The code was just appending a single point to a curve with each iteration, each point would have a new random angle/distance from the last.  I guessed that using the curve command in every iteration was what was slowing it down, so I changed it so that each iteration just calculates the new point location and adds it to a list.  Once all iterations are completed, use the list to append all the new points at once. 

cmds.curve(seg.name, ws=True, a=True, p=newPoints) 

This dramatically improved things.  I can run 50000 iterations in just a few secs.  However there does seem to be a limit to how many points can be appended with this single command.  I tried running 100000 and the progress bar fills up in just a few secs but it seems to get hung up trying to execute the curve command at the end.  Not that I need to do that many but I am curious why it gets stuck.  Anyway here's what is being iterated:

    while pointCount < totalPoints:
 
        if random.random() < 0.5:
            growth = random.uniform(0.1,0.2)
        else:
            growth = random.uniform(0.9,1.0)
 
        pAng = random.uniform(pAng - 0.78, pAng + 0.78)
        aAng = random.uniform(-1.57,1.57)
 
        seg.gPoint = (gPoint[0] + growth*math.sin(aAng)*math.cos(pAng),
                      gPoint[1] + growth*math.cos(aAng),
                      gPoint[2] + growth*math.sin(aAng)*math.sin(pAng))
 
 
        newPoints.append(gPoint)
        cmds.progressBar(progressControl, edit = True, step = 1)
        pointCount += 1
 
    cmds.curve(name, ws=True, a=True, p=newPoints)
    cmds.deleteUI( wind )