Is it normal for the Silhouette OFX server to use 100% of one CPU core while idle?

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1

Hi everyone,

I’m a Flame Linux user and I’m trying to understand whether this is expected behaviour or whether something is wrong with my setup.

System

  • Flame 2027.1
  • Rocky Linux 9.7 (Autodesk ISO)
  • DKU 21.0.1
  • NVIDIA RTX 4080 16GB
  • NVIDIA Driver 580.159.04
  • CUDA 13.0

What I observed

If I open a project that contains BorisFX Silhouette OFX nodes, Flame immediately starts the following process:



/opt/BorisFX/SilhouettePlugin/silhouette -flush -server=SfxRndr-flame

The interesting part is that I do not open the Silhouette editor. I simply open the Flame project.

However, the Silhouette process immediately starts consuming almost one full CPU core continuously.

Example:



PID       CPU
2440054   98-100%

top -H shows:



Threads: 7 total
1 running
6 sleeping

silhouette     99.9%
QDBusConnection 0%
QXcbEventQueue  0%
sentry-http     0%
cuda thread     0%

So it appears that only the main Silhouette thread is busy.

GPU usage

GPU usage looks normal.



Flame GPU memory : ~1.2 GB
GPU Utilization  : 0-1%

There is no heavy GPU activity at this stage.

Additional information

I noticed this behaviour on both:

  • Flame 2027.0.1
  • Flame 2027.1

I don’t remember seeing this behaviour with an older Silhouette release (before the newer UI/logo update), although I haven’t performed a controlled comparison yet.

I have also experienced several Flame crashes recently while working on projects containing Silhouette nodes, but I cannot confirm whether these crashes are related to this high CPU usage.

My question

Is this normal behaviour for the Silhouette server?

Does every Linux user see one CPU core at nearly 100% whenever a project containing Silhouette OFX is opened, even when the editor has never been opened?

Could someone running Flame 2027.x on Linux with BorisFX Silhouette please check if they see the same behaviour?

The same behaviour was observed on both Flame 2027.0.1 and Flame 2027.1 after updating to the newer Silhouette OFX release.

I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone running Flame on Linux with BorisFX Silhouette.

Thanks!

2

Is it the only batch group on the desktop?

Is this in an active batch group?

A closed batch group?

A saved batch group in a library?

3

Thanks for your reply.

The Batch Group is active on the Desktop.

The behavior I observed is:

  1. Launch Flame.
  2. Open a project.
  3. Open an active Batch Group that contains one or more BorisFX Silhouette OFX nodes.
  4. Without opening the Silhouette editor, the silhouette -server=SfxRndr-flame process starts immediately and continuously uses nearly one full CPU core (~100%).

If I open a project or Batch Group that does not contain any Silhouette OFX nodes, the Silhouette process is not started.

I haven’t tested the behavior with a closed Batch Group or with a saved Batch Group in a library yet, but I can test those as well if that would be helpful.

4

You may want to report this to the BorisFX Forums. They would be very interested in seeing this. Here’s the link:

Personally, I haven’t encountered this, but I have experienced issues with the 2026 Silhouette release using the ML roto tools on over 4k shots over 100 frames long. Marco and the team are working with me on resolving this issue.

5

Thanks for the suggestion!

I wasn’t aware that BorisFX has its own forum. I’ll keep investigating this and will also consider posting my findings there if the behavior remains reproducible.

I really appreciate your advice. Thanks!