Addon/Plugin load time detection
Addons are consistently used by everyone. some of them are large. Some severely affect the time it takes to load blender. It would be a great thing to have a timer so we can see which ones are actually the cause of slow loading.
This could be accompanied by delayed loading option which would decrease blender load times with heavy addon use.
having something like what is present in the geonodes (attached an image for what i mean by timing) where it shows time to load. Allowing us to debug the problems faster or simply know what to disable with out having to test every single addon one by one..
3 Comments
About the measuring addon loading times: I'm not for showing this in the interface nor for always measuring this. But I agree that it would be useful to be able to optionally turn a feature on to measure loading times per addon to know what addons are bottlenecks while loading. This info could perhaps be shown at the end of the terminal output which blender uses to start. But for me this feature should be optional to not polute the UI nor the terminal console with unwanted data all the time. I think this is only needed to shown once in a while to know what addons are fast and which not so much.
About loading addons with delay: take a look at the Clean Panels pro addon. I didn't try that part yet, but the pro version has it.
I have the pro version of clean panels. its good, but is falling very short and allows addons to sometimes not do as instructed and with the new system its got other issues, and also is a mess to set up as there is no easy way to make it work across multiple computers in a studio environment without extra scripting.
The request doesn't need to be integrated directly into the interface, I mean for it to be an option and was using the screen shot as an example of what the icon could look like to illustrate what i was trying to say. I don't think it should be a terminal thing it would unnecessarily fill that output log especially when using a lot of addons like in our situation. Selecting a check box to time or show last load times for addons are definitely an advantage. I think it would definitely help.
You are correct it doesnt need to run at all times. I only mean to check the start up time of a plugin (just like the geonodes timer, it should be an "option" the geo nodes timer isnt active by default.), even just storing the result and showing it next to the addon in the edit prefs would be fine, a constant timer wouldn't at all be needed, just a timer that detects startup and when everything is loaded it presents the data to the user in the form of either an advanced user option in the settings or as an option in the addons / extensions area . The only way ive so far been able to see this information is attaching blender to a profiler and loading it. which isn't intuitive nor practical and still doesnt make it easy to figure out exactly what addon is the cause.
clean panels is a good addon but with the new system it also doesn't work properly I've had to completely remove it across the team as it isnt working correctly and causing a lot of issues.
I'm only using the N-panel filtering features. I use those intensively every day with many addons (over 120) and never had any real issues. Also the dev is super quick to respond and always helps if there's a question, even in weekends. I never used Clean panels on multiple computers and never used the lazy loading feature yet, so can't comment on that. Maybe there it's getting more critical. If I were you I would contact the dev of the addon and ask for help.