Why is OpenLCA so slow?

Question

Hello everyone!

OpenLCA is very slow on my computer. Whether it's for calculations or even just opening the inputs and outputs of a LCI, it's incredibly slow.

The software doesn't crash completely. It often displays "Not responding" for one or a few minutes before finally displaying the requested data or result.

My PC should have sufficient storage and RAM.

I'm using EcoInvent 3.11.

My current software version is 2.6, but this problem was also present in versions 2.4 and 2.5.

Could someone help me identify the cause of this problem?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

So what do you do? How much RAM did you give to openLCA? How is it installed (on a remote disc?)? Which databases are you using? On a recent computer, openLCA should calculate ecoinvent 3.11 in less than a minute, and using the libraries within a few seconds.

Comments

Tanks Andreas for your reply!

I gave 15.0 GB Ram to OpenLCA.
It is installed on a 1To HDD.
I mainly use ecoinvent 3.11.

Here's what i can tell about my installation.

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thank you but "mainly" ecoinvent is not too clear; when openLCA is slow, you are *only* using one ecoinvent version and one system model in one calculation? The harddisc is not full? How much memory is used in the calculation? And how big is a product system that you calculate (how many processes) - thank you again

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Thank you very much for your help and for guiding me through the diagnosis.

After monitoring the system during calculations, it appears that the bottleneck is disk I/O rather than memory or CPU. openLCA uses around 1.5 GB of RAM, while disk activity is very high during calculations.

For context, openLCA and ecoinvent are installed on an HDD on my machine, whereas a colleague using a NVMe SSD (Kingston NV2) does not experience these performance issues.

This likely explains the difference in performance. I will look into migrating the installation to an SSD.

Thank you again for your time and support.

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ah I see, that could explain it indeed, thank you - especially if the HDD is quite full.

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Hello,

Same here, I see a lot of IO while RAM and CPU are not under any stress. It seems that disk access is causing freezes in OpenLCA 2.6 using EI3.12.

I would really appreciate any suggestions as its blocking me from using OpenLCA atm.

Regards,