# Best place to request a speedup of Blender import code? **URL:** \ **Category:** Python Support\ **Created:** [January 14, 2013, 12:43pm UTC](https://blenderartists.org/t/best-place-to-request-a-speedup-of-blender-import-code/562396 "2013-01-14T12:43:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![TomHarding](https://blenderartists.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/aeb1de/32.png) [@TomHarding](https://blenderartists.org/u/TomHarding)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2013, 12:43pm UTC](https://blenderartists.org/t/best-place-to-request-a-speedup-of-blender-import-code/562396/1 "2013-01-14T12:43:16Z")
I am currently working with models containing millions of faces, and the time it takes to import these into Blender is killing me. The models I am creating cannot be decimated without losing needed detail, and the entire model changes with each iteration (i.e. I create a completely new models on a regular basis). Once imported the viewing speed is fine, but importing from .ply files takes an obscene amount of time. Here are a few speed tests, run on a Win7 machine with 32GB ram & Intel 2600k processor: Blender importing binary .ply file (86MB): 89 seconds Blender importing text .ply file (142MB): 152 seconds MeshLab importing binary .ply file (86MB): 3 seconds MeshLab importing text .ply file (142MB): 6 seconds I’m aware that having the import code written in python would probably be somewhat slow, but 30x slower is a lot. I’ll be working with files easily 5x larger than that tested as well. Does anyone know an appropriate place that I could put in a request for import speed improvements? This isn’t a bug, and I haven’t found a good place to post something like this. ---
**Author:** ![Richard\_Marklew](https://blenderartists.org/user_avatar/blenderartists.org/richard_marklew/32/4458_2.png) [@Richard\_Marklew](https://blenderartists.org/u/Richard_Marklew)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2013, 12:49pm UTC](https://blenderartists.org/t/best-place-to-request-a-speedup-of-blender-import-code/562396/2 "2013-01-14T12:49:31Z")
You could speak to the developers on irc [http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Contact](http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Contact) Thread moved to python support ---
**Author:** ![CoDEmanX](https://blenderartists.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/77aa72/32.png) [@CoDEmanX](https://blenderartists.org/u/CoDEmanX)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 1:48am UTC](https://blenderartists.org/t/best-place-to-request-a-speedup-of-blender-import-code/562396/3 "2013-01-16T01:48:02Z")
since the importers are written in python, the performance is quite capped. Due to Python’s GIL, it can’t utilize the full power of your quadcore cpu. My dualcore i5 has 4 virtual cores and python runs at 25% cpu usage max, yours will certainly use 1.7 ghz of your 4 \* 3.8 (\*2 ?) ghz at most. Thus i would expect it to run 8x slower (maybe only 4x) just because of the missing multicore support. Then it’s python and no optimized C/C++ code, probably 2-4x slower. And finally, blender python has to interact with blender’s c-coded api… In total, 30x slower seems reasonable to me. Some optimizations to the import script might be possible, but i wouldn’t expect too much of a performance gain. You should rather look into the Bratwurst branch, there are builds around with assimp integration (= importers for OBJ, DAE, PLY etc. written in C/C++). The performance should be a lot better. ---
**Author:** ![TomHarding](https://blenderartists.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/aeb1de/32.png) [@TomHarding](https://blenderartists.org/u/TomHarding)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2013, 1:08pm UTC](https://blenderartists.org/t/best-place-to-request-a-speedup-of-blender-import-code/562396/4 "2013-01-24T13:08:30Z")
May try and see if I can figure out how to use IRC, but so far I’ve just seen random people on there. I’m guessing that Python just uses a single core for importing, which would work out to using 12% of the potential computing power. Of course I kind of doubt that other software packages are multi-threaded for importing, and considering my saving the file from c# takes far less time (while also parsing gigabytes of input data single-threaded no less), I’m guessing the slowdown is just due to the fact it is Python.