[Solved] Slow asset importing using 2018.2, macOS 10.13.4 and metalEditorSupport turned off

Hi there,

We've just upgraded a major project from 2017.4 to 2018.2 and are having an issue with FBX importing where it's incredibly slow. The strange part is that we have two identical Mac OS machines with the same specs, both running Unity 2018.2.2, both on the most up to date mac OS (High Sierra) EDIT: this info was incorrect, the minor versions of macOS were different between machines, one on 10.13.4 and the other 10.13.6. Except on one machine we can see in the Edtior log that importing an FBX file is taking 100 seconds, whereas the other machine is taking the usual amount of time at under 1 second:

machine with importing issue:
----- Total AssetImport time: 105.239388s



other machine running fine:
----- Total AssetImport time: 0.987947s

Can anyone think of what could cause this? It's only been since we upgraded that this problem is affecting one of the machines. In all tests we've used the exact same FBX file which is generated using Blender ie. we've been using blender to export FBX's for years for this project and have never had this issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Jason

 

Are you sure it's the FBX importer? Does it happen in a new project with the same fbx file?

I am asking, because we have a somewhat similar issue on a couple machines (Windows 10 in our case) but not on our mac, but for us it happens when we receive updates from collab (any file). It could be completely unrelated, but we too get AssetImport times of around 100s and I find that similarity suspicious.

 

Well that just happens to be a very coincidental suggestion, because we too have another problem that just started today where for no reason whatsover Unity Collab and Cloud Build automatically turned themselves on in our project. I watched it happen before my eyes... we'd started getting blue Collab icons appearing on assets in the project window even though we don't use Collab. I went over to the Services window and could see it was turned off.. then right before my eyes Collab and Cloud build suddenly turned on... and it was accompanied by some kind of popup saying we now have some new Unity Teams access??! This has got to have something to do with it given that you've had similar issues. Thanks for the letting me know.

 

@AcidArrow so yup, empty project with no Unity Collab messing with our project and it imports fine. The super annoying thing is that we don't even have Collab turned on, it turned itself on today for no reason and now even though it's off its still affecting one machine and causing this long import time. So weird.

 

After much debugging we found out it wasnt to do with Collab afterall. A major difference between the two machines is that one was running macos 10.13.6 and worked, other with slow asset importing was on 10.13.4. Also narrowed it down to a ProjectSettings.asset setting, metalEditorSupport: 0 ie. metal for the editor was off and I guess using OpenGL. We did not see this issue on Unity 2017.4, but after using 2018.2.2 and 2018.2.4 on macOs 10.13.4 it would cause slow importing. Turning metal editor support on of course fixed it as a bandaid solution, but instead installing macos10.13.6 solved it properly, allowing the slow importing problem to go away even with metalEditorSupport still off.