How to Improve the Simulation Performance
We are using Gazebo5 with ROS(Jade) under Ubuntu 14.04(64bit) to simulate a residence. There are many models used in the simulation environment, such as houses, roads, grass, pool and even moving person and cars. Most of them are sdf format which are created by Sketchup. It takes a long time(more than 5min) to load all models into the simulation enviroment.
Q1: Is it because of the sdf format version of the models that makes the loading process so slow?
Q2: Do I need to upgrade the hardware configuration of my computer? Following is the hardware configuration of my computer.
Intel® Xeon(R) CPU X5675 @ 3.07GHz × 12
4GB Memory
ATI FirePro V (FireGL V) Graphics Adapter
Q3: Which hardware is the bottle neck limiting the simulation performace most? Memory, Graphics Card or CPU?
Any suggestion would be appreciate.
Is it just loading time that's slow? or is simulation speed also slow? You can check simulation speed while simulation is running, by running `gz stats` in a different terminal, it should report the real-time factor.
@hsu The loading time is quite slow more than 5 minutes. I checked the `realtime factor` which is around 0.69. Any suggestion?
See my comment below about Collada loading performance. The realtime factor is likely low due to collision checks with triangle meshes. Ideally, a mesh is used for visual appearance, and simple shapes are used for collisions.