[ODE] trimesh performance

[Megan Fox]

If I understand correctly, you're using a trimesh with a body (vs your
previous experience with terrain, which would not have a body). 
Wouldn't this be a case where the trimesh's temporal coherence cache
would be active?  Have you tried clearing it periodically?

-Megan Fox

> I'm having some troubles with trimesh performance. I have a network game
> where players control trimesh objects, and the performance is pretty
> terrible when trimeshes have resting contacts (ODE takes 100ms to do the
> physics every frame). When I use a box placeholder, it runs quite fast,
> even with resting contacts (the ODE simulation takes about 0.6
> milliseconds of each frame).
> 
> Now, I'm not totally sure what's causing this terrible performance. In
> my test situation, all that happens is a trimesh falls onto a box and
> rests there, it's not even trimesh-trimesh collision. However, when I
> make the trimesh fly (so it's no longer in resting contact), then ODE
> takes barely any time at all. So it seems that this has got something to
> do with trimesh collisions. I'm pretty sure the problem isn't related to
> networking, because the networking code almost never teleports objects,
> and even when I make the game 100% locally simulated, it doesn't improve
> performance.
> 
> Does anyone have any idea what would be causing such poor performance?
> It doesn't seem to be fixed by changing the number of max contacts in
> the collision callback. The trimesh is very small, only ~60 tris. Its
> size in-game is about 0.1 units. In other games, I've used trimesh
> terrain and it worked wonderfully, and the terrain had thousands of
> triangles.
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