n-squared algorithm blocking startup

[The Leftover]

I had a huge loading performance a couple days ago.  I have gotten past it now but it seems like something you should know about.

I was trying to load a *lot* of meshes, say up to 20,000, and ran into a serious wall below that.  The time for the first render completion was over a minute.  I did the most practical thing, hit pause a few times to see what the system was doing.  My system was spending all of its time in a FOR loop in Material.prototype._markAllSubMeshesAsDirty.  (Attach 1)  getScene().meshes is all of my meshes, so this was a long FOR loop.

The plot thickens because it was a downstream side-effect of another FOR loop Scene._evaluateActiveMeshes.  This FOR loop was also the length of all of my meshes.  So, my first render was blocked by an n-squared algorithm that evaluating dirtiness.  Lots and lots of dirtiness.

I got past this with a hack, initially.  I disabled Material.prototype._markAllSubMeshesAsDirty for the *first* *render* only.  No ill effects.  Later, I started merging meshes.  Let me tell you, the mesh merging is the bomb!  It changed everything for my application.  Instances, yawn.  Clone, snore.  Merging killed it.

I do 3-d graphs and there are a lot of similar meshes (everything is a hexagon, for starters).  In my tests, I could reduce independent mesh count by a factor of twenty.  Now I am loading 150K hexes fast and with good frame rate.   

I archived the original problem child at http://www.brianbutton.com/chart3d/carthagevirgin.html

[GameMonetize]

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