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Slow Civil 3d, cause by slow server, but still frustrated

63 REPLIES 63
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Message 1 of 64
kickhead70
5911 Views, 63 Replies

Slow Civil 3d, cause by slow server, but still frustrated

Our server recently got tied up running backups, so all performance suffered for a morning, but it revealed some of Civil 3D's behavior that may otherwise go unnoticed. Here's relevant details:

 

  • Win 7 Pro 64, HP EliteBook 8760w with add-on 27" monitor, 16GB RAM
  • Civil 3D 2012, all latest patches/service packs.
  • All support files pathed locally.
  • drawing being worked on is the source for surface data for data shortcuts.
  • all automatic rebuilds of any kind turned off.

Many, many common functions of even vanilla autocad were unreasonably slow.  Why should there be a 20 second delay after clicking a hatch to grip edit?  Why should there be a delay after editing a feature line (no auto rebuild)?  I understand the lag with rebuilding the surface, but not the simple things. It was my understanding that AutoCAD had a system where all drawing data is been copied locally to work on, and saves go back over the network. It seems like Civil3D / AutoCAD generates a ton of unneccesary network traffic for many things which should be able to happen strictly locally.  Am I missing out on a setting somewhere?

Thanks!

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63 REPLIES 63
Message 2 of 64
sboon
in reply to: kickhead70

Typically when I see selection delays and weird lags it's related to either a driver issue or something to do with your video/display settings.

Steve
Expert Elite Alumnus
Message 3 of 64
kickhead70
in reply to: sboon

Steve (good name!)

 

thanks for the reply.  I've pretty much work through all my issues with drivers/video a while ago and my only complaint about normal operation has to do with the lag cause by having the properties window open. I'm hoping to find out if anyone else has seen behavior like this, or to get AutoDesk's attention to look into why they seem to be generating so much network activity. In this case, I know the system (network) was slow because the server was overloaded. My problem is, with the way I have it set up, why should our slow server affect the program performance so drastically in operations outside of open & save?

 

Thanks again,

Steve

Message 4 of 64
sboon
in reply to: kickhead70

If you have the Windows Task manager open while working in CAD do you actually see the network utilization change?

Steve
Expert Elite Alumnus
Message 5 of 64
kickhead70
in reply to: sboon

I have a Network Activity Indicator app running that shows the blinking monitors (like windows xp) with network traffic.  When there's a delay with Civil 3D, i see an outgoing blip, a delay, and as soon as the incoming blip is done, Civil 3D comes back to life. That little app really makes me aware are how much traffic is being generated. Funny thing is, there've been times when I've worked at home, with no network connection, and have much better performance from Civil 3D than at the office.

 

thanks again,

Steve

Message 6 of 64
Jay_B
in reply to: kickhead70

Have you cleaned out your temp folder recently?

Jay
C3D 2018.1
C3D 2016 SP4

Win 7 Professional 64 Bit
Message 7 of 64

I am having this issue also. 

Message 8 of 64

I have those issues also. Keeping toolspace closed helps with certain issues. Same with SSM.

 

I've done some testing with 2013, and it works much better than 2012. A lot of issues just don't exist in 2013 that are just maddening in 2012. Problem is, we haven't put 2013 into production yet, and while it takes care of most of the issues I have with 2012, it appears to have a whole new load of new issues all it's own. Smiley Sad

Message 9 of 64

We are also experience the same issue where either Civil 3D, ADT, or MEP 2012 or 2013 seem slow over our network. I'm hoping I can get other people to run a test to see if other users are having this problem but before I do I will explain our company and network and what I have done with the network and what I have found out.

Sorry for the long reply but I think this problem is important and is affecting a lot of Autocad users.

 

For starters people either complain on how long it takes to open, save, plot, work on a hatch, the first time you launch Mtext, and especially using Sheet Set Manager (SSM). So I have been doing a lot of research and I have concluded that if you are sharing any standards on a network on a shared drive is when all these problems occur. If you use Autocad just out of the box and locally everything works fine.

So I have been doing a lot of research and have spent a lot of time and money on our network to solve this problem and it's still not completely solved. So in my opinion the problem is with the Autocad code and working across any type of network.

 

Our company is an Architectural, Engineering, Environmental, and Surveying with 8 offices.

All 8 offices are connected on a Wide Area Network, 6 have 20mb, 1 has 40mb, and our main office has a 60mb WAN connection. Our main office is where we store all of our companys files and Autocad standards so all 7 offices are working back to our main office. I would say on average our main office pipeline is using only about 30mb through out the day. All of our servers are using Microsoft Server 2008 R2, and all of our workstations are using Windows 7 Pro 64bit with about 16gb of ram.

 

When I started looking into this problem I thought it was our network at one of our offices that was at 20mb so I upgraged and bumbed it up to 40mb and this office has 40 employees and I would say 20 are using Autocad.

That did help but not what we were expecting. Before I forget our local users at our main office where also complaining about how sometimes Autocad is slow, so it's not just our users outside of our main office where the main file server is. So doing more research I have seen discussions about turning stuff off in Autocad and we did all of that and that improved it a little bit but again not to our expectations. For example I told people to close all palettes, tell SSM not to sync, turn off digital signature, and upgraded network and video drivers, so pretty much I did everything possible I could with Autocad and the workstation and still we are not getting the performance that we expect.

 

I then found these two programs that would capture our network and workstation traffice and they are:

Process Monitor http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx I used this program to capture what activity happens on the workstation.

Wireshark http://www.wireshark.org/ I used this program to capture all network traffic.

 

This where I need your help, if someone at least could download the Process Monitor and capture traffic on the workstation and see if you get the same results as I do. You aren't going to believe this if I read the data correctly.

Basically Autocad is looking for about 30-50 files and it's searching in about 30-40 different folders looking for it and basically can't find it. For example it might be looking for a file called gdi11.hdi and it will look for it in for it all over on the workstation and if you opened a file on the network then it also looks for it and if you have any custom file search paths in your Autocad profile it will also look in those folders. So if you can imagine everytime you open, save, print, switch between model and paperspace it's contastanly looking for files in all the wrong folders so no wonder it takes Autocad so long to just launch or to open, save, print, etc... it's wasting a lot of time looking for files and wasting our bandwidth.

 

If you decide to use Process Monitor to run this test and see for yourself I recommend using a filter so that you can just see the acad.exe process and what files it can't find.

In Process Monitor go to Filter / Filter and you will be adding three seperate filters.

1.Process name is = acad.exe

2.Operation is = CreateFile

3.Result is = name not found

 

What you can also do is start and stop and clear the events just to see what Autocad does, for example capture what Autocad looks for starting up, stop it and then clear it while leaving Autocad open, then start the capture again with a clean slate and now open a file, and do the same thing for printing, switching between model space and paperspace, etc... and you will be amazed.

 

So I would be curious if others are seeing that the acad.exe process is wasting a lot of time looking for files in the wrong places causing Autocad to act slow on certain operations. I'm currently working with our reseller who is working with Autodesk on this right now and I think if I can more proof and help from the outside I think we might have a better chance of Autodesk listening and fixing the problem.

 

Thanks

Brent Morris

Message 10 of 64

Brent,

 

This is a top contribution, thanks. Seems AutoCAD is getting more and more busy with itself, and there is less and less processor time left for the user.

 

I'm running 45 survey crews on three LNG construction sites, and apart from the networking issues we have the additional company security further crippling the users. I have my own personal notebook with a local install of AutoCAD Civil3D, connected to nothing and using a USB-stick network to transfer files when needed. It is so much faster than the company CAD machines, and does not suffer from lags. The company ones keep going into short (2-10 second) "hang ups" every couple of minutes, as AutoCAD wrestles with network, firewalls and security I think, very frustrating and needless.Press F1 and it  takes 30-50 secs before the help comes up (although the "access online content" check-box is unchecked). It's quicker to Google the problem.

 

Just watching AutoCAD start up, partial menus get displayed, taken away, redisplayed, the screen gets reorganized about a dozen times before the eventually system settles down, pays attention to the user and the keyboard and mouse accept input. Messy.

Hans Moller
Surveying & Management Services
Gladstone Australia
Metabox 16GB, Intel i7-9700K 3.6Ghz, 500GB SSD, 2TB HDD Nvidia GTX 1060
AutoCAD Civil 3D 2018
Message 11 of 64

I downloaded process monitor and setup the filters you specified.

 

Doing nothing I saw thousands of acad.exe "name not found" results in a few seconds.Most of them have the path: C:\Windows\CSC\v2.0.6\namespace\PSDCFP-SM

 

That doesn't seem right. Is autocad just bagging its head against a wall over and over? Oh wait, that's me everytime I get the grayed out scren and blue wheel of death.

Ian McClain
Message 12 of 64

Isn't it amazing.

I did another test and opened Civil 3D 2013, opened a drawing and my test was to just capture what Autocad looks for when just moving a line. I have attached an excel file showing all the files and locations it looks for a file just to move a single line and that is it, I couldn't believe it.

So basically and this is just my guess but every command you do in Autocad it's wasting it's time looking for files, so just imagine when I have 80 users working over a WAN on files and all of our Autocad standards and every single command X 80 going across our WAN wasting time and bandwidth.

 

Brent

Message 13 of 64

I tried a google search for C:\Windows\CSC\v2.0.6\namespace\ and found several links describing a Windows issue with Sync Partnership.  Might be a solution in there somewhere.

 

Steve
Please use the Accept as Solution or Kudo buttons when appropriate

Steve
Expert Elite Alumnus
Message 14 of 64
HansSMS
in reply to: kickhead70

This all seems pretty serious, it would be good if someone from Autodesk could post a response.

Hans Moller
Surveying & Management Services
Gladstone Australia
Metabox 16GB, Intel i7-9700K 3.6Ghz, 500GB SSD, 2TB HDD Nvidia GTX 1060
AutoCAD Civil 3D 2018
Message 15 of 64
ralstogj
in reply to: kickhead70

Hi

We have been having issues in our office so I upgrading our switch to a 1gb one on Friday this made thinks a little faster but did not fix the dwg drawings that hang for a couple of minutes on loading. So I watched what autocad was doing and it is looking for a load of files and not finding them. Some are lsp and fonts which I have added over the years but it seems to look in multipile places for them i will have to read up on how to reference these just once. Looking at the largest lags in time of 20 second or more one is looking for .dwl files that have gone from the project file I always assume these were safe to delete with not issues but this maybe one. I will continue to look into things when I have time
Regards

Justin Ralston
http://c3dxtreme.blogspot.com/
Message 16 of 64

In a way I'm glad that other people are able to see this problem and in my opinion this is a big issue.

The problem is that Autocad does look for multiple files everytime you do a command and it's looking in places that you wouldn't think it would be looking for them and Autocad will try to look all over for these files trying to find them.

There is nothing you can do because this is coded into acad.exe so even though you might just have 1 reference location for example all of your companies fonts on the network, Autocad just sees this as another folder to look through when it's looking for a *.dll, *.arx, *.cuix, etc... so the more folders you have in your profile for network standards the more folders that are added on for Autocad to wastes it time looking for program files that it should be looking only in one location.

 

One thing you can do however to speed up Autocad is if you do have all of your companies standard fonts, ctb's, pc3's, etc.. on the network is to reduce the number of fonts and ctb's that are in those folders. You can do a test and just have a few font's and ctb's and starting a Mtext and plotting will be faster at least in bring up the dialog boxes.

 

Brent

Message 17 of 64

It's been suggested to us, that you avoid network search paths if at all possible and use robocopy or some other function to localize your normal LAN and WAN Standards....

John Hammer, LA/CADD Manager
Message 18 of 64

Here is the response I have gotten from Autodesk on this issue:

 

Thank you for your patience. The issue where the application is continually reaching over the WAN to look for files in their customized Support Files Search Paths is reported. This causes program to perform slowly.  Every time a command is invoked that requires one of the files from the Support File Search Paths, the application looks for it.  Not just the once, but every time. Your customer is pointing AutoCAD to continuously access some custom folders and files which are on the WAN network.

Unfortunately, there is no way to keep AutoCAD from doing that kind of searching because it is hard-coded that way.

 

Being Windows certified program, AutoCAD would respect all the Windows profile related paths, hence it is recommended to keep the paths within the profile (default settings in the deployment). Unfortunately we cannot alter the Programs behavior to suit your environment, but we can make some recommendation.

      

Use Default User profile for storing the support/custom files, keep these paths locally and that may help with WAN issue.

     

User profile could be on the server (Roaming), but it shouldnt be setup like a folder redirection.

o    If roaming user profile is setup as per MS documents, it will only write back roaming part of the server on log off, and local profile always remain on the local machine. WAN is not used when using the programs.

Message 19 of 64

I think that he means the LAN not the WAN, the only way it'll search over the WAN is if you HAVE ONE with say a VPN tunnel and drives mapped to such... there is a very specific procedure that the program uses to allocate files in the search paths.

 

It works from top to bottom, so the 1st rule of thumb is to always keep the default folders on your local C drive so it can find the defaults there and keep them at the top of the list.

2nd rule, limit the amount of LAN stored search paths, i.e. extra fonts, extra hatches, extra plot styles, extra lisp routines, extra whatever... now granted you can only have 1 printer path....

 

3rd rule, don't map drives over a vpn tunnel

 

remember, cad can copy the profile from a deployment down to the users workstation and they can keep their profile on their c drive, you can over write company wide with some server tools....

 

the only stuff you want on the server, is the stuff you change all the time that you don't want people to change without sharing :0

 

with that said, I need to get our fonts and hatches and all that distributed locally and get rid of as many LAN paths as possible, probably just plot styles, plotter, and pmp file

 

John Hammer, LA/CADD Manager
Message 20 of 64
troma
in reply to: Hammer.john.j

We just got to mapping our plotters over the network for 2013. Apparently someone tried it for 2011 but it caused crashes. In 2013 one user had no problems, but another said it locked up for ages when opening the Plot window. So he copied the folder to his C drive and pointed the path there instead, and problem solved. Don't know what the difference is between setups!

Mark Green

Working on Civil 3D in Canada

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