2.0.1193 on the Mac is the most unstable yet

[michaelbuffington]

I've been timing how long before crashes occur as I struggle to try and use the app today. The longest I've gone crash free today is 4 minutes and 33 seconds. That's not a joke. The shortest stretch for today was essentially zero seconds. That occurred when I launched Fusion 360 after a crash and moved my mouse over the "recover this file?" dialog for the design from the previous crash. Total crashes in the last 3 hours: 11.

If I hadn't seen the stability of the last build, I'd have ditched Fusion 360 long ago.

I think there are some serious foundational flaws at play here that are likely to prevent Fusion 360 to ever work well (at least on the Mac).

For example - I'd bet that a lot of the stability issues are related to how "unconventional" the app is. It uses very few, if any, native GUI controls. Whether this affects stability, I'm not sure, but it's certainly a contributor to how clunky the app feels. The app probably also does unconventional things with the OS's event manager.  I say this because most apps on the Mac don't decide to bring their windows to the foreground, seemingly at random for no reason. Compare this app's launch behavior to that of other Mac apps. When launching other apps you're free to switch to another app while the freshly launched app loads. It's rare that the freshly launched app will steal focus.

If you try switching to another app while launching Fusion 360 you're asking for trouble. Fusion 360 will steal focus almost immediately - try to switch to another app again and it'll steal focus again. In total (I've counted), it'll steal focus at least 4 times. Worse, if you switch away while Fusion 360 loads the odds of it launching with all of its menus and windows intact are slim. I can almost gaurantee that it'll crash on two of my systems before I ever get a chance to click on anything.

The troubling thing about app launching is that Fusion 360 takes a relatively long time to load. I have the most recent Macbook Pro with the fastest CPU, solid state storage, and 16GB of RAM. You'd expect it to load within a reasonable amount of time on that machine. It doesn't.

I also have a Mac Pro with a 12 core CPU, 32GB of RAM, and dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs, each with 6GB of VRAM. It's difficult to find a faster machine at the time of writing this. The second slowest app loads in under 2 seconds (Photoshop) - most are launched faster than I can press the stop watch.

I just timed how long it takes to launch the lastest Fusion 360 build on that machine: 37 seconds (that's from when I double click the icon to when I see the dashboard finish loading and things are clickable). That's ridiculous. My old Windows machines go from power on to full OS load faster than that.

Now, before you blame the network connection - I have a 100mbit fiber connection. If loading the dashboard takes ages, it's certainly not for lack of a good internet connection or hardware.

I think in an effort to have a single universal codebase you've instead locked yourself into a single universal glacier of a codebase with bugs that could be common to all, or unique to a single OS (but require testing on all target OS's). Rather than write software that leverages the advantages of the various target OSs, you've written software that only uses the common demonitors of each OS.

The result is an unstable, slow, quirky, and hard to maintain beast.

I feel for the team behind the product - if it were fast and stable, it'd be one of the best modelling tools I've used. That alone is the only reason I've stuck with it this long - the potential. But potential doesn't help me get my work done.

Let me know when you've got a truly native OSX app with all the features of Fusion 360. Until then, I'm out.

[bespenship]

Hi Michael,

I'd like to work with you on this as soon as it is convenient for you.  Your experience is not typical - I (and a number of other guys on the team) are running the current MacBook 15" Retina with Nvidia graphics.  Some of us also have the Intel Iris Pro graphics so that's covered as well.  Some of your observations are insightful and accurate, and reflect some of the technical tradeoffs made to bring functionality to market as quickly as possible as reflected in your feedback.

That said, many people I have contact with (both within Autodesk, and customers) are running Mac machines like yours and this description of your experience if far worse that anything we have encountered with this release, especially regarding stability.  Contact Joel Palioca (joel DOT palioca AT autodesk DOT com) and please keep me (brent DOT espenship AT autodesk DOT com) in the loop as soon as you can, so we can work with you to get you back up and running again as quickly as possible.  Even if the issues you are seeing are paticular to your system (installed software, corrupt installation, somethign particular to your design, corruption in your hub, etc), you've been a great partner in the community and we want to see you back up and running again productively with Fusion.  I'd normally work with you directly until we resolve your issues, but Joel is out today and I am on vacation next week.

The first thing we will do is completely uninstall and purge everything from your local installation, so let us know if you've already done this.  If that doesn't resolve the problem, we'll go deeper in looking at your hub (account) on our end, and then continue to troubleshoot your issues until we have you back up and running again.

Thanks again for sticking with us - I agree that many (if not most) people in your situation would throw up their hands and walk away.  We really appreciate the opportunity you've given us to make this right.

[Oceanconcepts]

Yeah, wow, that sounds terrible. I’ve had issues with Mac graphics in this last release, but I am on a geriatric 27” iMac with weak graphics, and I’ve seen nothing comparable to this. I have downsized my Fusion window and experienced several days without a crash (other than related to my sometimes cutting out fiber connection). Full screen this was very unstable, but with fewer pixels things have been good. Not as good as if it worked at full resolution, but a pleasure to use nonetheless. Hope they are able to get this sorted out. 

[swicksell]

For me it crashes as well, can't even edit a sketch or make a bevel without it crashing. Before this release it was just slow but almost no crashes!

And im on a 13" retina 2.6ghz, 8gb.

[bespenship]

Hi all,

We haven't heard back from Michael yet, but we are looking into the three CERs we see from him.  Swicksell - of course, the same offer applies to you - contact Joel (joel DOT palioca AT autodesk DOT com) and keep me in the loop (brent DOT espenshipAT autodesk DOT com).  Let's get you back up and running productively.

Ron and Kingson - thanks for chiming in.  Kingson - I agree with your feedback - most engineers want to be running on the most capable hardware possible.  That said, some of our target customer groups are makers and people who have great ideas they want to bring to market and are empowered by recent innovations (cheaper additive / subtractive manufacturing, kickstarter funding, broader open source offerings, etc) that allow them to pursue their ideas without access to substantial venture capital.  Many of those folks are on shoestring budgets while they bring their idea to market.  We test on both ends of the spectrum - we may not always have the latest hardware, but we're always close.  Using me as an example, I have a 2006 iMac on my desk along with my 15" retina MacBook, and Windows workstation.  After the trouble last release with graphics, I'm now running Mac OS X 10.7.5 on my iMac, so I at least have the lowest denominator Mac that we unofficially support (although I did upgrade to 2 Gb of RAM on the iMac ).

Thanks again for your continued support.

[Anonymous]

Hi Brent I thought you were on vacation. I deleted my post because it was a bit too long. I think if a machine is really really fast, the machine is waiting for Fusion to load the graphic data from the Cloud and that is when the problem came. For example, my Apple Air could not even touch the new Fusion Rendering and the screen becomes wild. But no crashes. Now that is a lower performance machine slower than the program. I still believe a complete clean out of all the left over files will fix the problem. Well I let you know when mine comes in and if started to crash, then we have a little performance problem here. Enjoy your vacation! The faster the machine, the faster the problems came and the faster the crashes. Sometimes that is the case with workstation class machines.

[Anonymous]

Hi Ron, I think the unstable iMac in full screen mode could be the Hidden Dock interference. I tried that before and now I downsized the Fusion Screen so the sudden appearance of the Dock from the right side (yes mine on the right side) will not touch Fusion Screen. That seems to work quite well.
Kingson

[joel.palioca]

Hi Everyone,

As Brent mentioned, please reach out to me so that we can follow up on your issues, and work to get you back up and running.  You can either reach out to me directly at the email below or if you would prefer just let me know and I can reach out to you and we can connect directly around your issues.

Michaelbuffington and swicksell - if you see this please reach out, and I will follow up with each of you around your problems.

We are always looking to improve our performance and capabilities, and your feedback is always helpful in this regard.

Cheers,

[Oceanconcepts]

Hi Kingson,

In my case that wasn't it. I said full screen, but actually I was just dragging the window out to use as much screen as possible while still being able to see the dock on the right. I would get parts of the display disappearing or hanging, or repeating image, or switches to wireframe when I worked rapidly, even with all effects turned off. Downsizing the window to use fewer pixels seems to have helped. The combination of a 27" screen, a five year old video card, and 512 MB of vram does not seem to be a happy one for this version of Fusion.  My issues are described here: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Help-and-Support/Odd-failure-mode-lost-all-manipulators-components-dis... I didn't tag the thread as Mac as when I started it I did not know that the issues were Mac specific. 

[michaelbuffington]

Sorry for the late reply - I've been off the grid for a bit.

I'm happy to try and troubleshoot further - though I won't have access to the Mac Pro for a while as I'm travelling.

That said, I should have mentioned earlier that for this build I've tried every Mac related "solution" found on these forums and elsewhere with no luck. I've reinstalled, I've toyed with window sizes, made sure the dock is visible. I've tried variations of using the Macbook Pro's Retina display only, or an external 27" Cinema Display only, or combos of both. As both an engineer and a software developer, I tend to be pretty systematic.

The only thing I haven't done is install this build on a fresh install of OSX 10.9.4. There may be an opportunity for me to do that in a few weeks on the Mac Pro.

It's encouraging to see people motivated to help. I recognize that there's value to that.

That said, I'm still deeply concerned about stability.

For example, reducing the window size of the app shouldn't be the thing that increases stability. The fact there's a relationship there isn't encouraging - 3D rendering isn't trivial, but there are tried and true best practices and mature and stable technologies available. If Fusion 360 is inventing new 3D rendering technologies then stability may be a long way off.

Another example: ensuring my dock isn't hidden is peculiar. When writing a traditional native app for the Mac in Objective-C it's actually difficult to get yourself in a situation where the Dock could in any way cause stability issues with your app. There's a significant amount of decoupling from all the various OS layers, as well as sandboxing and other obstacles. That there's a relationship between the Dock and Fusion 360 suggests that there's a lot of very unconventional things happening in Fusion 360.

I'm not discouraging unconventional practices or new inventions - they're vital for pushing technology forward. I think in the case of Fusion 360 there are many unconventional inventions that are crucial to what make it good. I also think there are many inventions in Fusion 360 that are likely the root cause of its stability issues. I think it's most likely that those "bad" inventions are there solely to make the application compatible with multiple operating systems. So rather than use libraries built specifically for Windows, and libaries built specifically for OSX, the application uses libraries that work for both (just not that well).

My ideal version of Fusion 360 would be one that takes full advantage of the strengths of my OS. In OSX, that means it uses common OSX HID libraries. It uses OpenGL for rendering. It uses native GUI elements and keyboard shortcut capabilities. If I were on Windows I'd probably have similar expectations.

It's this last point that is the real bummer - I doubt Fusion 360 will ever be fully native for OSX. If it was stable, I'd could live with that. But as I've said, I think the stability issues have their roots in the lack of nativeness. I surely hope I'm proven very wrong soon. There's so much that Fusion 360 gets right that I would love to be able to use with confidence.

[michaelbuffington]

By the way - after a fresh install of Fusion 360 on my Macbook Pro I get a floating UI element that won't go away and floats on top of all other app windows. So if I CMD+Tab to another app, I see a rogue floating element (see image below). Pressing "Cancel" on that element will crash Fusion 360. I've completely removed Fusion 360 and reinstalled twice. I see this on both fresh installs.

[joel.palioca]

Hi Michael,

I appreciate the response, hopefully with some work we can find the issues you are having and get them resolved for you.  I am going to try to respond to as many of the core issues that I can gather from your posts.

Firstly taking a look at your crash reports, one of the issues you have repeatily hit is related to a crash while leveraging sketches.  We have a bug relating to this issue, but are still in the process of investigating the cause.  I will add some of the information you have provided in your bug reports and this forum post to the report and hopefully we can find a resolution to this.

It sounds like you are hitting a large number of crashes, have you been able to send in the crash error reports for these?  Looking at 7/17/14 I can only see 2 that went through, so if there is a problem with the error reports coming through we would want to find a way to get this information so that we can better understand the problems that are occuring.

Your comment about Fusion 360 stealing focus away during launch is something we are aware of and is something we are actively pursuing.  I have made an additional note on this problem with some of your comments.

From what I can gleam from your posts it sounds like you are currently running on OSX 10.9.4 and are leveraging potentially a late 2013 macbook Pro with Iris graphics for your main machine?  Is this correct or do you happen to have your system information handy that we can look at?  There are multiple models of the macbook Pro that meet your specs that I have seen so I want to make sure I know of the correct model.

For the problem with the floating UI element, you mentioned you have already done two complete uninstalls and reinstalls.  Just to confirm by complete uninstalls this means you have done the following:

         MAC
           Uninstalling

         1. Click the Launchpad.

         2. Look for Autodesk Fusion 360 (if you have many applications, look through all the Launchpad screens to find it)

         3. Find and click on the Remove Autodesk Fusion 360 (icon with a black “x” on it)

         4. Repeat the above steps  to uninstall Autodesk Sim 360 by finding and clicking

             on the Remove Autodesk Sim 360 icon if needed.

         Clearing your cache files - If you are having any issues with data that is not showing up in Fusion 360 anymore please don't delete these folders.

             1. ~/Library/Application Support/Autodesk/Web Services
             2. $TMPDIR\Autodesk\BrowserCache

             3. ~/Library/Application Support/Autodesk/webdeploy

(note - if you have multiple autodesk products installed this is one of the areas that the core files are saved to.  Blowing this away will result in the removal of many required files.  If you need to find out which folder in this is specific to Fusion 360 you can RMB on Fusion 360 while it is installed and go to "Show in Finder" this should show you the current installation location for many of the core files.  We want to make sure that any of the current and previous files will be blown away and you have a fresh install)

Cheers,

[michaelbuffington]

I suspect you'd get more crash reports from me and others if the crash reporting itself was more responsive.

For example, I just loaded Fusion 360, saw the GUI artifact I showed previously, and clicked the cancel button. As clicked the cancel button I started my timer. 15.6 seconds later I was given the opportunity to send the report.

That's about 14.6 seconds too long. When the app has thrown away the last 4 minutes of work due to a crash, patience is in short supply.

Ideally I could toggle a setting that said "Automatically send anonymous crash reports" - then you'd get all the other crash reports I didn't send. You wouldn't get my ranting description of what I was doing leading up to the crash either. Which might be a good thing.

As far as "reinstall goes", I use a tool called fseventer when installing any application. fseventer uses the fsevents API to detect changes to the files system. It lets me record file system changes in real time. I use the data it collects to know exactly which files an installer installs (including files it moves to the trash, to temp folders, logs it modifies, etc). When I want to remove an app, I just feed that data into a Ruby script that removes the installed files. There's little to no chance I leave a file behind (unless the Fusion 360 install somehow knows how to go undetected by the fsevents daemon - not impossible, but also extremely unconventional and irresponsible).

So while I don't do it the Autodesk way, I assure you, there's not a trace of the app left when I'm ready to install again.

As far the machine specs go - here are some specs for the machine I'm currently on, a Macbook Pro. I won't have access to the Mac Pro for a couple of weeks.

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro10,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 8 GB

Intel HD Graphics 4000:

Chipset Model: Intel HD Graphics 4000
Type: GPU
Bus: Built-In
VRAM (Dynamic, Max): 1024 MB
Vendor: Intel (0x8086)
Device ID: 0x0166
Revision ID: 0x0009
gMux Version: 3.2.19 [3.2.8]

NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M:

Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
PCIe Lane Width: x8
VRAM (Total): 1024 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x0fd5
Revision ID: 0x00a2
ROM Revision: 3688
gMux Version: 3.2.19 [3.2.8]
Displays:
Color LCD:
Display Type: Retina LCD
Resolution: 2880 x 1800
Retina: Yes
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Built-In: Yes

[banshee10]

I'm on the other end of the spectrum - I'm one of the people you talked about who's brand-new to the whole 3d-modeling world, attracted by new ways to build interesting stuff.  (I've been writing software since the 80s, though, so I'm not exactly new to the complex-software world.)

My stuff is tiny, hobby, and really just hello-world, but just tonight I've had two crashes (reported).  It's not really giving me a warm fuzzy feeling about using Fusion for anything complicated.  And the fact that the dashboard is glacial with a tiny number of projects/models is a bit scary.

Plus, I was going to ask in the forums why some of my models don't show up when I try to insert them in another file.  Turns out that copy is broken when you go to permalink.  (The menu item is there, and you can select the permalink, but it doesn't make the text available outside Fusion.)  It's not like that's some huge problem, but the small annoyances pile up.

My hardware isn't bad - I'm on a Macbook Retina:

Processor Name:Intel Core i7

  Processor Speed:2.7 GHz

  Number of Processors:1

  Total Number of Cores:4

  L2 Cache (per Core):256 KB

  L3 Cache:6 MB

  Memory:16 GB

Intel HD Graphics 4000:

  Chipset Model:Intel HD Graphics 4000

  Type:GPU

  Bus:Built-In

  VRAM (Dynamic, Max):1024 MB

  Vendor:Intel (0x8086)

  Device ID:0x0166

  Revision ID:0x0009

  gMux Version:3.2.19 [3.2.8]

And my network isn't terrible either, speakeasy says I'm getting 18Mbps down/3 up tonight.

(I used Fusion on Windows over the weekend; it seemed much more stable than the Mac version, fwiw.)

[banshee10]

And there's my third crash of the evening - CER_98945798. G'night.

[Anonymous]

Hi Banshee,

Just before your system crashed were you using "Push Pull" command on some small objects of less than 1mm in diameter?  I had found that using "Push Pull" command by dragging (mouse or trackpad) usually crashes the Mac system. Extrusion seems to be OK. I worked around that by clicking on the arrow then plugging in the numbers instead.  In fact that is more accurate because I usually calculated the dimension I wanted. If you are using Fusion Rendering and system crashes, your graphic card is not powerful enough for that. But that only happens to the Apple Air., not the MacBook Pro. That is one of the reasons I purchased the MacBook Pro because the last few updates completely removed my AIR form the Fusion Rendering list.

[joel.palioca]

Hi Michaelbuffington,

Sorry about it taking so long to respond, we are still investigating your crashes.

When your running fseventer is it only during the installation process or also during your use of the product?  The reason I ask is because Fusion only creates some of the folders I mentioned during the usage of the product and not during the installation.  It may be worth it to take a look at the locations I mentioned to see if anything that was added after running fseventer is still laying around.

Thank you for the specs, it should help us in our investigation process.  I will pass along some of your comments about the Crash system, I agree that it would be very helpful to have it work similar to the way you are describing.

Cheers,

[banshee10]

I suspect not for the push-pull, but it's possible.