MEP 2010 - painfully slow to use

[Anonymous]

In the last few weeks, we've installed MEP 2010 (an upgrade from 2008) on all computers in our office. 2008 wasn't great, we were hoping for an improvement by going to 64 bit and adding RAM, but we didn't get it. This software is just terrible to use. Is there something we can do to speed it up? We do have some computers with dual quad-core processors, but they don't seem to run any faster than the other machines. Typical computer specs are below.

Everything about 2010 is just painfully slow. There seems to be a lag of 1/2 second to 3 or 4 seconds for every task you do, from editing text to selecting simple devices like receptacles and circuiting. Anytime anyone selects a receptacle (for instance), there is about a 1.5 to 2 second lag before the computer will respond again. Opening files takes minutes, and occasionally it will take so long that you give up and shut down the software (after waiting 10 to 15 minutes). Every process is so painfully slow it seems like our CAD guys spend less than half of their time working and the majority of their time waiting on computers. It is maddening to spend nearly six figures on software and have it operate so poorly.

The file sizes that we are working with are generally in the 1MB to 1.5MB range, typically with 2 to 5 other drawings inserted by x-ref.

Typical Computer specs:
Quad Core Xeon 3.2GHZ processor (Dell Precision 690)
6GB RAM
Windows 7, 64 bit, fresh install
Video: ATI Fire GL V3400

What can we do to speed up the process? Are there settings/features/menus or something else we can disable to make AutoCAD faster? When I open files from projects we did 8 years ago without all of the object oriented devices (receps, fixtures, circuiting, etc.), the files open in seconds and they are very easy to use.

[Anonymous]

Mr. Schmid,

I'm going to have to call BS on this one. This BS about network or disk latency is not helping us come to acknowledge and ultimately make progress toward a solution. As a network engineering firm, we design, configure, and support very large data centers and enterprise networks. This is our passion and, practicing what we preach, we have our networks completely baselined and monitored. I can watch the session flow between our servers/SAN and workstations and this has nothing to do with latency or throughput (wirespeed gigE to desktop). Our server, storage and network is hyper-overkill for our size. Our new cad workstations are Dell 7500's with Raid0 with dual Quad Cores and Quadro 5800s. Our horizontal cabling is pristine Cat6 with the test reports to prove it. In short, our office network represents to our customers what we can/will do for them.

If you scroll down in this thread and see my raging rant below you can clearly tell I'm practically out of mind here. I mean I'm writing on a forum at 4:45am, instead of my project, because I'm simply at my wits end.

Unlike a few of the others, it has not been < 1 week for me with 2010. Search back on my other posts a few months ago. I find it insulting that AutoDesk will not acknowledge this performance and stability issue and make whatever remedies to correct this VERY REAL ISSUE the top priority. Look over this thread and acknowledge the corroboration of all the users and posts. Are we ALL network and disk i/o bound. The fact is, if there was a way to purchase my way out of this completely unacceptable performance problem I would be buying it right now instead of writing this post. It sounds to me like everyone who listed their hardware here recognizes the real cost of "slow" and has purchased computers far and away above average. As much as I've wasted on workstations, again, hoping to purchase a version of AutoCAD that would finally take advantage of some of it, I am let down again.

I posted this response, in addition to my post below, because we need fixes/workarounds/patches (something!) to fix this pathetic release...not AutoDesk redirection and cop outs. It's time to stop, acknowledge, and work with us to make a single robust release we can stake our businesses on. We're not posting here for social networking. We're angry! We feel ripped off! Some of us have our whole livelihoods/businesses relying on the ability to produce more with fewer people due to this economy. Having that requirement not only not met, but flat out CRUSHED, is NOT ACCEPTABLE.

I've have tried everything I can think of to make this release perform acceptably. For the few people that mentioned that they were not having significant performance problems, try setting up project navigator with a complete project of any size. Even without project navigator, I cannot imagine any type/experience of professional user that would not clearly and immediately find the performance completely unacceptable. Using performance monitor on your PC yields 7/8 cores with nearly nothing to do. As mentioned by others below, the RAM usage is surprisingly low. I have also have an ISV certified laptop with MEP2010. It performs no better or worse than my full-size workstation. Clearly, our investment in hardware is not being utilized to it's fullest. No/minimal multi-threading and the single CPU that AutoCAD does use is rarely tapped. Disk activity is extremely brief (fast Raid-0) when accessed and our office has between > 8 GB free RAM at any given time (no swap/paging used).

Now, instead of AutoDesk's redirection and cherry picked responses, let's hear AutoDesk's plan to fix our problems. No more BS! I'll hear some acknowledgement and light at the end of the tunnel, or I WILL consider coordinating a legal solution with the thousands of others which post and DO NOT get around to posting to this forum. I am dead serious! We're waiting!

Sincerely,

tyler@oneinterface.net
(Daily AutoCAD user since v2.5)

[Martin__Schmid]

As long as you are a subscription customer, you should be entitled to product support. There is a link within the software to log and view requests. Re attached image.

[Martin__Schmid]

Thanks for your post... as I'm sure you can imagine, there are a variety of user types and dependencies within the software. One user's solution (i.e., http://discussion.autodesk.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=6352400 ) may not be a fit for another seemingly similar problem.... a forum such as this isn't the best avenue to dissect performance problems. However, if you were to log a product support request, this is the best avenue to make sure that specific issues are tracked. Please include a reference to my name in the support request as I would like to see the dataset causing the problems, and apply pressure where I can.

[Anonymous]

Glad to see we're not the only ones experiencing this issue. Our IT guy pushed MEP 2010 because he wanted to go to win7 and 64 bit. In our testing mode the acad version that worked the best was plain old vanilla acad 2008. We have a wide spread network and people working with various types of internet connections, and for those on the slower connection speeds 2010 has been excrutiating. Even on our T1 lines it takes way too long to save a drawing.

It's time for Autodesk to step up to the plate and admit that these are major problems that are not caused by us the user, but by the software itself. The stuff costs way too much to be this bad. If this was an automobile, we'd be dying on the roads. Where's the recall?

[Martin__Schmid]

So, it is File Save times that is the issue here?

As indicated previously in this message, I'd be happy to push on these issues if you file a support request, and include my name in the info. Without data demonstrating the problem, it is hard for development to investigate where the bottle neck may be. I.e., if you have the same file in Acad 2008 and AutoCAD MEP 2010, but it is significantly slower to save in AutoCAD MEP 2010, all else equal, that would defininately besomething to look into.

If you'd rather, I've setup a Buzzsaw site where you can post files, and you can include a note detailing the specific performance problem you'd like me to dig into... however, be advised, that this is not the official channel for support cases to be tracked... but I'm happy to dig into the issues.
https://projectpoint.buzzsaw.com/MartinSchmid/_PUBLIC/Temp?public

[Anonymous]

Martin: Thanks for your time in response. I can say it was definitely not disk latency issue. It was a driver setting.

With this problem I had used the following: Velociraptors in RAID 0, OCZ Vertex SSD, and even a bleeding edge OCZ Limited Edition SSD (>$900 drive). I am a believer in fast hard drives. IMHO and against most people's general understanding, in an otherwise very fast computer hard drive speed has the single biggest influence on perceived user speed. Case in point, with the LE drive, Win 7 FULLY LOADED would boot over several times faster (thats hundreds of percent faster) than a normal "high speed" 7200 rpm drive, and general user feel can only be described as "instant gratification." Too bad that drive lasted 48 hours. What a waste of time.

I digress...

I did find something that made a huge difference and it was so simple, I felt stupid when it worked. I changed the "Display Performance" in general windows settings - via control panel I believe - from "Quality" to fast or speed or something like that. It was a night and day difference in lag with MEP. It went from total I-Wont-Use-This-Feature-Ever slow to just a noticeable but acceptable delay. That was with a GeForce GTS 8800, an aging but still fairly good card. I would check to see exactly where tis setting was at and called exactly, but I no longer have that computer up and running.

I have since changed computers from that desktop to a new i7 notebook, with an 1GB ATI HD 4670. Its drivers don't have the same "Display Performance" tab but it is never had the lag I was seeing previously. For those of you wondering, the 8800 (the n92 version is what I had) hda frame raters about 50% faster than this new 4670, but of course we are comparing desktop to mobile, which is a bit unfair.

I hope this helps someone else out there. I apologize for not posting the solution I found earlier.

Scott

[Anonymous]

Not file save times, nor file related. See my post I just placed in reply to one of yours earlier.

Thanks for your time.

Scott

[Martin__Schmid]

Thanks for your posts, Scott...

There are many things that may effect performance, and different users have different expectations about different aspects (pan/zoom, orbit, file open, add duct, plot, etc..).

The post on "Posted: Apr 1, 2010 10:38 AM " indicated
>wide spread network and people working with various types of internet connections, and for those on the slower connection speeds 2010 has been excrutiating. Even on our T1 lines it takes way too long to save a drawing.

Thus, if the software works quicker when all is local (not stated in this users post, but implied that the network is at issue by indicating that slower connection speeds is what is excrutiating), but I'm happy to see how their dataset performs on my machine.

Your post indicates something different from this user... in your case, the issues you were seeing were resolved by changing a video driver setting... not likely to help the post noted above with problems with slower connection speeds (but perhaps will help others).

I've seen cases where a bad profile (sometimes a Windows profile, sometimes the AutoCAD profile pushed to many users) causes poor performance problems (sometimes causing file open problems, sometimes causing general UI responsiveness).

[Anonymous]

I am wondering what kind of projects people are working on that are having these problems?

People are saying that "Autocad vXXXX" ran perfect.... what happens when you open an older project in Autocad MEP 2010? Do all these problems still occur?

Thinking back, Autocad did run smoother for me 5 or 6 years ago, but the drawings were 2D and way less complex than what I do now. The drawings would consist of a 2D background and 2D polylines representing conduit and a a light fixture would be a block that consisted of 4 lines. All the other trades I would coordinate with would be working in 2D Autocad most of the time too.

Now conduits are 3D MEP objects. Light fixtures are complex custom 3D objects. I need 3rd party object enablers to view other trades 3D models. The backgrounds are usually huge, highly detailed 3D models usually not originating from Autocad. One project I am working on, the structural steel CAD file is 50mb and detailed in 3D down to nuts and bolts. I doubt a workstation that could handle a job smooth and fast 5 or 6 years ago could even open one of my current projects.


I wouldn't use Autocad MEP for BASIC Autocad stuff. I push my computers and my software very hard, and I have modify the work flow around the crashes and the lag, I expect it. I also know that a lot of the time it isn't Autocad itself that is the problem it is a CAD-Duct generated Xref that is bringing everything to a crawl.

It isn't perfect, but for what I use it for it works pretty good. And the trade off is that I have very accurate shop drawings that might take more time on the front end but more than make up for it when it comes to actually building a job. I think if I was doing more engineering or design type of work as opposed to MEP work, I could probably get by with a standard version of Autocad and MS Excel. I work for an electrical contractor, and so far I have yet to use the panel schedules or circuiting features of Autocad MEP.

But like I said earlier in this thread, I got rid of the ribbons and figured out how to configure my workstations to run pretty fast and smooth, even on complex projects.

[Anonymous]

Duh, Martin, what do you think we've all been talking about here? There is a noticable difference in speed with the same or similar drawings between earlier versions of AutoCAD and this one. If there wasn't, we wouldn't be griping about it. I could send you examples of files that worked fine before and are slow now all day long and it wouldn't change a thing. It's not the file, it's the program. This is obviously an across the board problem; all you have to do is read these posts. Excessive time in saving is only one of the issues. Here are my gripes:

1. The VBA Enabler (something we should NOT have to be loading as an add-on) screws up the way the task-bar buttons work.
2. Excessively slow file saving times.
3. Everything thing seems a bit 'sticky'; cursor movement, command response times, etc. (Everything that is, except for the docked manager windows, which open way too readily when the cursor is even brushed momentarily over them and take too long to close)
4. Drawing units for drawings brought in from earlier versions (virtually ALL of our drawings) default to Millimeters, even if the Units dialog box is set for inches and I'm using Imperial (I'm talking about the Units tab in the Drawing Setup dialog box, not the Units dialog box)
5. Lisp routines that we've been using for years suddenly require adjustments to work in acad MEP 2010.
6. Sheet Set Manager no longer allows selecting more than 3 non-consecutive files, it just unselects one of the previous ones for each new one I select.
7. Printing Dwg to PDF using Sheet Set Manager often comes up with an 'out of memory' error, and no suggestions as to how to get around it, even if I only have one or two sheets in my printing set.


Autodesk really needs to look in a more holistic manner at how they are doing things . First there were 'Profiles' which were supposed to make things easier for us to standardize, then there were CUI files, then Workspaces, then Tool Palettes, now Ribbons, all of these things touted as wonder drugs designed to make our lives easier, but in truth none of them really fully work as advertised. Rather than fixing them, Autodesk simply comes out with the next wonder drug. It's a shell game; smoke and mirrors. I don't think you have any idea how onerous it is to try to get all of my users on the same page when I basically have to 'customize' every user on every machine to work the same way, going to six different places to get all the settings correct.

Here's the bottom line: Most of us are not using autocad in order to see all the bells and whistles and go ooh and ahh over the fancy new chrome. We're not using autocad to use autocad. We're using autocad to design systems, to create drawings for our clients and contractors, to come up with the end product of a printed drawing. We've already spent a huge amount of time setting up tools, palettes, toolbars, lisp routines, profiles, cui files, workspaces, etc and then training people how to use them. The economic situation of the country right now is demanding that we be more efficient, be more productive, have more output for less input and we run up against this roadblock of the software not performing as it should and actually slowing us down left, right and center. And then Autodesk says 'File a support request', and I gotta say; that does not seem like responsive customer service to us.

There are a lot of ways Autodesk has gotten things right. I don't want to give the impression that I don't appreciate many if not most of the new features that have been developed and offered over the years. I personally think the idea and intention behind every one of these improvements has been for the best. And I think that many of them could work a lot better in their execution and presentation. However, the impression I get whenever we have issues is that Autodesk considers itself and its product perfect in every way and if there's a problem it's a 'user' problem or a 'hardware' problem. Admittedly, there are a lot of times when this is true. This is not one of those times.

The first step on the road to recovery is admitting you've got a problem.

You want a file? I just uploaded a file to the Buzzsaw site. This file (and every other file we have) opens, works and saves noticably slower in MEP 2010 than it does in ABS 2007.

thanks!

[Martin__Schmid]

Just a few follow ups-

> what do you think we've all been talking about here?
Well.. believe it or not, there are folks that have multiple drawings of 3-5+ MB in size xref'd together, all with all 3D objects, hidden lines through xrefs, custom objects with hundreds of facets from detailed imported geometry, and then they wonder why performance is not like a 'standard' 2D line drawing. I wish everything was as instantaneous as the 2D world, but I also remember AutoCAD 10 being slow to pan/regen, etc,, so I hope that it is only a matter of time for the 3D world to catch up (I certainly wouldn't trade my current hardware for that I had three years ago!)

>There is a noticable difference in speed with the same or similar drawings between earlier versions of AutoCAD and this one...... You want a file? I just uploaded a file to the Buzzsaw site.

This is very different! And that is concerning to me. From what you've stated (at least what I'm hearing) is that the same file from AutoCAD 2007 opened/edited/saved in AutoCAD MEP 2010 is slower. I downloaded the zip, but when I opened the largest dwg, I noticed it was last saved in AutoCAD MEP 2010 with the service pack. This really can't be used to directly test performance of the same file in 2007 vs 2010. Even when saving to 2007, the file retains some later version info which could actually impact functionality in 2007... so, I've cleaned out the AEC data from the file and saved as 2007 format.

Have you (or others) noticed the same slowdown in AutoCAD 2010, and not just AutoCAD MEP 2010?

>1. The VBA Enabler (something we should NOT have to be loading as an add-on) screws up the way the task-bar buttons work.
Are you referring to http://www.autodesk.com/vba-download ?
Read more here about how this affects Autodesk products.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=12729484&linkID=9240618

This is a bit off this topic, but can you be a bit more specific about how things are being 'screwed up'? MEP specific or general to AutoCAD? Perhaps others that have seen this will offer advice if you start a new topic, perhaps in the AutoCAD VBA forum.

>5. Lisp routines that we've been using for years suddenly require adjustments to work in acad MEP 2010.
I've seen this to be the case with a few commands, don't recall the specifics... Again, is this specific to MEP 2010 or is it general to AutoCAD 2010? If I recall, there are a few command aliases that are different in MEP than AutoCAD, is this what you're referring to (not aliases as in .pgp, but as in how the actual command is defined in the software). I'm not sure why that is, and usually, from what I have seen, the fix is relatively simple... Again, more specifics are welcome. I understand the concern, and it would make sense that things are at least consistent between products of the same version.

> 6. Sheet Set Manager no longer allows selecting more than 3 non-consecutive files, it just unselects one of the previous ones for each new one I select.
Is this reproducable in 'regular' AutoCAD 2010, or just MEP? Is it all sheet sets, or isolated to some? I just gave it a go, and seemed to work as expected (re attached image).

> 7. Printing Dwg to PDF using Sheet Set Manager often comes up with an 'out of memory' error, and no suggestions as to how to get around it, even if I only have one or two sheets in my printing set.
Is this reproducable in 'regular' AutoCAD 2010, or just MEP? Is it all drawings, or isolated to some? If it is consistently reproducable with certain drawings, it could be due to some corruption in the drawing (or a defect). I don't have the tools to diagnose that, but I can submit the data with reproducable steps to someone that can.


> And then Autodesk says 'File a support request', and I gotta say; that does not seem like responsive customer service to us.

These forums are actually intended for user-to-user communications (click the Ground Rules link near the top/right corner of the screen), and are not intended for user-to-autodesk support. There are quite a few employees that do scour the newsgroups, but as this is not our job role, and tracking issues in the discussions is not tied into our internal systems, The official support channel is through Product Support, and those are tracked using Support Requests.

[Anonymous]

We were experiencing extreme problems with slowness (+5 min to open drawings) across platforms of Civil3D, MEP, and AutoCAD 2010 due to a sheetset corruption problem. While that probably doesn't address all your problems, try saving a local file without the sheetset information and opening it or try rebuilding your sheetset to see if that helps.

For the most part, we have slowness problems with MEP as well but we are still using old 32 bit workstations also.

Good luck!

[Anonymous]

I just want to jump in here. We were very disappointed with MEP 2009 much
like you are with MEP 2010, constant trouble. We are now using MEP 2010 on
64bit vista machines with 4 gig ram and dual core 3.33 gig processors. I
have been working with piping 3d and our dwgs average 30megs each some as
high as 60megs. I have multiple xrefs and even have attached multiple TIF's
and PDF's for backgrounds and have not had any problems with speed or
saving. The difference for us may be that we do not work over a network but
standalone. I also have been using the ribbons and found them a great
additioin once we were able to get used to them. We are quite pleased with
MEP 2010, this is the first release that we really liked since BS 2007.
Finally something that works for us the way we would expect. I know this
doesn't help your question, but I wanted to point out that it does work well
for some of us. Since we have no problems with huge dwgs, maybe the the
majority of the issues with speed have to do with working over a network.

[Anonymous]

We also fight slow autocad however recently discovered that most of it is related to nvidia video cards and the drivers. You definitely need to get the most recent driver for your specific card. Also, do Not use the Autodesk version of the nvidia card for performance enhancement, it was much slower and often crashed. Found it by accident when a laptop with less than half the ram and half the cpu was out-performing a beefed up box. Updated drivers helps a bunch or even better if you have the option, take out the nvidia and only use an onboard intel, and it performs even better. And a week ago we tried going from xp to windows 7, which again is a Huge leap in performance. We are not seeing the ram usage anywhere near what it was, we can now have multiple Autocad 10 and Revit files open and switching between drawings all day long without slow down or lockup.

[RedMan77]

Its the MEP definately. Our machines have Quad core, the best hard drives money can buy, 64 bit machine, 4 GIG video ram, 16G-32G of RAM and MEP 2010 is still a beast. I am having a hard time believeing its ,merely a video driver that is the issue. What I iwll beleive but havent been able to test it yet is the problem being related to network issues. Edited by: thecadmancan on Apr 6, 2010 11:47 AM

[swimdawg]

We had the same issue with slowness when we first installed MEP 2010. We were upgrading from 2008 and had just purchased new top of the line machines, Dual quad core processors etc. More than enough horsepower to run 2010. Once we got it up and running it was painfully slow, took forever to open drawings, even just selecting an icon took forever for it to work. I did some digging around and found the solution to our problems. It had nothing to do with Nvidia card like most of you all think. I know, I tried to update the drivers etc to no avail. Its a setting in your Appearance and Themes that needs adjusted. Heres what worked for me and fixed all of our slowness problems:

Go to Control Panel and click in the following order

1. Appearance & Themes
2. Display
3. Settings tab
4. Advanced - button at bottom right
5. Troubleshoot tab

From there if your Hardware Acceleration bar is pegged to FULL... back it off 2 notches and apply.

That easy change made a night and day improvement!! You may need to back it off more than 2 spots depending on your system but 2 slots worked for us.

You may need to restart your program or reboot your machine, cant remember.

Hope this helps the rest of you suffering from this problem.

Chad

[Anonymous]

I'm not able to find settings for hardware acceleration. I do have the latest drivers for my card. It is an ATI FireFL V3400. Does anyone have any idea where I could find those settings?

Does Autodesk create any official recommendations for resolving speed/performance issues with their software?

[Anonymous]

Not sure about themes and hardware acceleration. Sounds like windows 7 but not sure. But that brings to mind when I received my fuel injected hemi computer with the super duper graphics card (Nvidia), MEP2010 was having a very difficult time starting. Martin's suggestion to talk to Autodesk is important, and I immediately did that. Even though they couldn't find my problem, in discussions with them (and my gaming background:) I realized myself the imcompatibilty of my graphics card with my operating system. Even though the card was sold to work with the setup, the card was really optimized for Windows 7 and not XP like I had. I downgraded my card and things work well now. That was my experience and reading these posts I realize how many variations could swing the performance envelope.

[swimdawg]

Just to clarify my solution in my previous post... we are running XP (32 bit) on our new machines with an Nvidia card. So for us, going through the Appearance & Themes etc.... and lowering the Hardware Acceleration bar down from Full was the solution to our slow MEP issues. Obviously this solution may not work for everyone depending on what version of windows and what type of video card you have but I guarantee it is what worked for us. I actually found that solution online through an internet search, otherwise I would have never thought to look there to adjust the bar. Hopefully this clarifies my previous post a little.

Chad

[Anonymous]

Two things that I have done that GREATLY increase the speed is;

Dont work with the "Properties" toolbar open.
Turn "SHOWLAYERUSAGE" to "0" (Off).

Simple things that make a huge difference.