General: Performance

[Helmi74]

Class already brought up some performance problems in this thread but i thought it would be a good idea to address other performance issues in a more general way.

Generally speaking i think cloud products still face lots of problems and hard argumentation against the users/customers as some are still doubtful due to privacy, performance and reliability concerns. While privacy concerns seem to disappear slowly (reasons? facebook, nsa,...) performance and reliability remain as big hurdles where cloud enabled software (at least professional software like x360) still needs to establish.

When we talk about cloud software we often talk about Webapp — applications that run in the web completely without ever needing anything more than a browser with some javascript. I'm into the web business for quite some years now (almost 20) having worked in different parts including building websites myself for business a while ago. Things have changed quite much during the last years and web applications run quite well nowadays - something you wouldn't have imagined only a few years ago. The primary reason which makes them working well is improved performance. This is not only because of servers have gotten faster and broadband today means having several MBit/s in most of the households but primarly because techniques have arrived and settled that enable developers to not only work with page reloads and full page loads on every click but allow dynamicly modifying web content "on the fly". Requests happen in the background and mostly only load some content for a page where most of the application itself is already loaded at the beginning or lazy loaded while the user was still thinking about what to click next.

One of the good examples of a well developed web application that is mostly fast and also good on the UI/UX side is Google Analytics. Most of you that drive your own siteor monitor your companys site will most likely now it.

For Web Applications i think it is crucial to be performant and have a good UI/UX. Without that users won't accept software beeing in the web. While there are big discussions every time facebook changes their UI a bit there's nearly no discussion about their performance. Just because this is something they have on the very top of their "important things to always have in mind" list. They are really crazy on this part and doing really great work to keep their performance high. You won't even notice if they have a peak load of users online or not (well most likely because they always have a really big amount of users online). And this is crucial. 

just to to make it clear: Web Applications need to work as fast as desktop software to be accepted as a replacement for desktop software or to be accepted as a real value. This is even more true if the thing they are doing is typically desktop type work and not internet type work like networking, chatting, whatever.

And here's the link to 360 products on autodesk (sorry for taking so long untill getting to this point but... ;-)). The dashboard basically is a web application. What we see when starting Fusion360, Sim360, Cam360, whatever 360 product is the dashboard first. Well at first we don't see it because it takes a **** load of time (sorry for beeing so rude but... ;-)) until the dashboard even shows up.

I just tested this on my every day working machine and we're not talking about and old or small computer (iMac i7, 32GB Ram, FusionDrive)

• ~15 seconds for startup of the software itself (loading screen + UI to show up)
• ~50(!) seconds until the dashboard appeared the first time
• ~60(!) seconds for dashboard elements to load completely

For comparison: AutoCAD2014 took me 2 seconds to start and another 2 to completely load my last file and i could then start to work. With Fusion360 i even hadn't clicked my last file after a minute. And to compare this too (though this has already been done in the thread linked in the beginning: From clcking on "open design" on my last opened file in the Dashboard it took another 5 seconds for the first reaction of the UI (which is the first really critical point) and 15 seconds to completely load fusion and the file.

But back to the dashboard: Have you loaded http://news.google.com lately? Or http://www.yahoo.com (which takes a few moments longer). Of course we're talking about the top class of websites and we know that they have loads and loads of servers, administrators and programmers in the background, they also have to deals with even bigger loads of traffic and users. Compared to the amount of users using the 360 dashboard (of course i don't know numbers but i think we all agree that this amount of users won't be that big that user load could be an issue here).

While a few months ago i would have thought that this basically is some kind of beta issue, you are now charging money for the services which makes it kind of a final stage in software development. you're "live" now and to be clear i think this performance is basically inacceptable and i think you are definitely loosing customers there.

When beeing in early stages of software like Fusion360 still is you can always talk about important functions that are missing and say "well, we'll add this later, we know what to do next" which is acceptable, but people won't accept instability and performance on the long run. 

Additional problem is, that the dashboard is not only needed to load the file up and once it's up performance is only local (and the performance of Fusion360 itself is much better though not excellent yet) but you always see this bad server performance when working in Fusion, too: Importing files, Saving your file/versions, opening another file, uploading some CAD data - even when you're in work you still have to slow down because of several functions relying on slow servers. The way the file set is loaded every time i hit the 'insert' button in Fusion360 is truly crap. I can't find any harmless word for that. It takes hours (well feels like) to even be ready to search for a file).

After all: performance for me is a big frustration when working with Fusion. I would say the biggest right after all the crashes (that have gotten a little bit better for me after the last update but still happen way too often and too often file recovery fails but that is a different topic) and just a little bit in front of most missed features: better relative positioning and 2d vector exports.

I'm still sticking with Fusion360 because i love the product and i love you guys here around doing a great work (and i know that) but i think there are some bigger issues that make Fusion (and the dashboard) still a beta product and i think it would have been a good idea to not go public so early.

my 2 cents (once again)

...and sorry for needing so many words again 🙂
 

[CGPM]

Not to discount what you are saying but it seems performance is mixed.  I just opened Fusion and it took 21 seconds total, then 6 seconds to open a file.  On a Win7 3.6 ghz Phenom 2 with 4 gigs of DDR2 800 ram, but with a good SSD.  This is pretty consistent for me.  As for going "live" so early I think we all can understand the pressure to start charging $, and at $300 a year I am happy to do so, even if I still consider it in beta.

[thburn]

Hi,

I 100% agree with what Helmi74 says. The overall performance is not acceptable and still feels like a kind of beta version not a live application.

Especially the 5 seconds delay after clicking the 'open' button (to open a design) is a good point to show bad performance of the dashboard.

I click 'open' top open a design but the button does not give any visual feedback. After 5 seconds in the top bar of dashboard I can read 'Opening document...'.

During this 5 seconds you can click the open button again and again, normally after first click it should get disabled to provide visual feedback.

I also don't like that the open button is not visible all time. Only if you move the mouse into a design, then the button appears finally. This is not best practice for a user interface!

Here some data starting F360 on my office machine:

(AMD Phenom II X4 840 Processort 3.2 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Windows 7 64 Bit professional)

15 seconds until F360 splash screen comes up

45 seconds dashboard is visible

15 seconds until dashboard finished loading all content

So overall 75 seconds to make the dashobaord accessible!!!

20 seconds until F360 is ready for working with after clicking 'open' in dashboard to open a design.

20 seconds just to open a simple design with only one body!!!

I also really like F360 but up to now I don't like working with it because too bad performance.

Personally for me autodesk should first concentrate to optimize performance instead adding new features.

[CGPM]

Monday morning at 8:51 PST it took 31 seconds to start Fusion and 9 seconds to open a drawing, completely.  Not great but I think acceptable.  What is causing the discrepancy in performance?  I am located about 80 miles east of Portland Oregon with a broadband connection.

[Helmi74]

i'm located in germany with broadband (15Mbps) too. I'd accept a short delay oversees but i'm using other US services without a big lack in speed - this shouldn't make such a big difference. Though 30+ seconds is still a long time i think.

And just to be sure: The startup of course isn't the biggest issue (as it happens only once for a while) but the overall dashboard performance is the real problem. This is what you use rather often so here's the important performance.

[Oceanconcepts]

As another data point, I checked today and with a 25 mbps connection Fusion opened fully to the dashboard in 45 seconds, opened my file in 15 seconds. 

I second the comment about the lack of feedback when opening a design- it makes me wonder each time if I missed hitting the button- but if I wait 5 seconds or so the beach ball starts to spin. Sometimes it's the UI details providing feedback that help provide a perception of responsiveness. 

What I have seen recently, and I did not see previously, is Fusion stalling when selecting a tool- any tool- almost appearing to freeze for 5-7 seconds, then getting a brief glimpse of the spinning ball, and back to normal.  It doesn't happen all the time, maybe every 20 tool selections, but it's disconcerting when it does. 

Could this be related to my having enabled product usage data tracking?  If so, it's fine, it's not really hanging me up and I want Fusion to improve.

[cekuhnen]

With Fusion not being a cloud computation software doing the calculation local I would assume that

opening a file and saving a file should be done through the local file data. And once you save data

or close a document the updated information is pushed online into the cloud.

I did measure the times on two different mashines and they are equalL

11 Splash Screen

26 Dashboard

= 37 Seconds to start Fusion

26 Open files

10 Save files

I am personally much more concerned how long Fusion takes for very simple tasks

such as selecting 20 TSpline patches and deleting them.

Waiting 10, 20 seconds for a simple delete command is not ideal at all when you try to work fast.

Rhino or Alias are dramatically faster in this aspect.

But compared to the early stage of Fusion the UI/UX improved a lot, specifically with TS rendering.

[cekuhnen]

Here is a screenshot from a model I tested and it took 56 seconds to convert the poly model into a TS model.

For me the biggest interest in Fusion is the TS to NURBS workflow and speed is really crutial to me because

it impacts the workflow and how fast you can explore different design ideas.

And cleaning up the mesh removing the triangle edges because Fusion doe snot yet support NGON imports takes another 44 seconds.

Deleting the edges in box mode is much faster just few seconds. But then switching to smooth mode takes a long time.

However I must say I have no idea of the complexity of the math behind this conversation.

[bespenship]

Thanks Helmi for starting this thread and everyone else with your specifics on startup, dashboard interaction, and working with design data (file I/O). Development is investigating how we can improve performance.  Our current focus is in Fusion startup, dashboard interaction and update, and working with design data.  We are also looking at UI and workflow design changes to optimize our design and data interaction.

Thanks to all of you for sticking with us, despite some of the frustration expressed here. I also appreciate the constructive feedback and examples you all provided in the thread - we will include that data with the benchmarking being done by our QA team.

Please keep the feedback coming - we are listening and responding as quickly as we can.

[deyop]

You should see the NGON support shortly.  We have found the issue and the fix is now being tested.

[cekuhnen]

looking forward to it.

[cekuhnen]

Hi Brent, no worries, software development is no kindergarden activity.

[Oceanconcepts]

As largely software developers ourselves, I know we appreciate rigorous feedback, and I try to provide it here in the spirit of helping with the product. 

Fusion as it is today allows me to do useful work, and since I spend an inordinate amount of time simply staring at the screen trying to figure out what my design should be, I am by far the slowest part of the system.