Since the upgrade from 5.4 to 5.5 I’ve noticed a severe drop in performance within the editor, both in play mode and out. It’s gotten so bad that Unity will actually use up 100% of available memory when “Importing small assets” (which happens even when closing the editor?).
I’ve also noticed extreme stuttering during play in the editor, even when just moving the editor camera around. I believe even normal editor use is taking up significantly more memory than it used to, which may be causing the stuttering. This is not a minor performance issue, its severely impacting my ability to develop our game.
This is while closing the editor and “Importing small assets”. I watched the ram usage spike from 8GB to 12 in the space of a few seconds, with it peaking at 99% usage and causing my entire system to start stuttering until it finished:
I’ve tried to troubleshoot the issue, even deleting the entire Library folder for good measure. My system is not weak, and this was not occurring on 5.4, so it must be a regression. Specs: Windows 10 x64, GTX 980 Ti, i7 3770k, 16GB RAM
Our project is pretty large and intense for a Unity game, but as I said it wasn’t like this in 5.4.
Is anyone else experiencing editor performance issues in 5.5?
Sadly I’m also finding performance an issue after upgrading to 5.5, we consistently hit 110 → 120 frames per second in our VR app when running in play mode on 5.4, on 5.5 we’re lucky to hit 60 fps which for VR is totally unusable.
+1 to this. We are finding the editor hangs a lot more in 5.5, we are required to force close it often. Whenever code is changed the editor will often take much longer to update, sometimes importing several assets again.
Hey! Thanks for this. Would you be able to submit the bug report directly from within the Editor? That way we can get all of the logs which will help with the investigation. We also have an ftp you can use if you want to share your big project with us, let me know so I can sort you out over DM.
Thanks for this info! I’m adding a note to the report mentioning it, and we’re going to try to leave a larger project running for a while now to see if we get anything.
Alright, I believe I may have found the root cause of the issue.
A while back I had disabled “Compress assets on import” to save time when messing with textures and whatnot. I haven’t experienced any problems for several months. After upgrading to 5.5 many assets were re-imported automatically. I believe this caused them all to become uncompressed, including ones that had been compressed previously due to building. All these uncompressed assets were then being loaded into memory when I opened a large scene.
This also aligns with a similar issue our audio designer was encountering even before the 5.5 update. He never builds the project, leaving any new assets uncompressed on his system compared to the rest of us.
While this was obviously user error, a warning when memory usage is crazy and that setting is disabled would probably not be a bad idea.
I hate piling on to a thread without being able to add any actionable information, but we are in a serious bind here. We upgraded our VR game from 5.4.2p3 to 5.5.0p3 a couple of weeks ago and did not discovered the substantial performance loss this entailed until we released it as an update to our users three days ago. Our telemetry shows a more than 15% drop in the percent of users maintaining over 80fps. We are seeing our active user numbers falling accordingly as people give up on playing a VR game that no longer can achieve a playable framerate, and our forums are filling up with people complaining about the bad perf.
If there was any reasonable way to downgrade to 5.4.2p3 I would have already taken it, but unfortunately the file format for prefabs, etc has changed and downgrades no longer appear to be an option. We are at the point of considering throwing away all the work our studio has done since the upgrade and writing off the loss in order to get back to a known good state. If anyone has any additional information on this issue, or suggestions on ways we could help debug it, please let me know!
Also, if anyone has attempted to write a tool to manually parse the asset files and downgrade them from 5.5 to 5.4 (we use text serialization so this should be feasible) I would love to see that code. I’m about to start down that path now.
I have been getting a lot of emails from people seeking a downgrade tool, they locked the thread I mentioned it in - so I can’t go back and add the link. Instead I’m just going to start forwarding them here.
I didn’t optimize it. It is slow. If you have a really big project, or it is really struggling — separate your impacted scene & prefab files, run the tool, put em back.
It will only work if you set your asset files to text mode
Will downgrade gameobject prefabs and scenes
Will not downgrade particle systems (I know the format changed, but I didn’t investigate when I drafted the tool as I didn’t need to downgrade ours - particle systems have been broken since 5.4 anyway).
No promises, it will break stuff, so don’t use it unless you REALLY need to.
To be honest, this really SHOULD only be provided by the Unity team - I can’t help much beyond this. No one really knows why they decided to make these serialization changes… It appears unnecessary / only to cleanup a handful of redundant entries (by replacing it more redundant entries). Essentially someone felt it was more valuable to replace all the GUID entries with the word (component) …
IMHO; this change should have been sat on until there was a reason in the future to modify the serialization and stands as a junior level textbook example of when not to change data formats.
