AutoCAD temporarily freezes

[cfare]

Cad People,

We have a problem in here with 4 machines currently running AutoCAD (2x R11 and 2x R14) where we experience intermitent freezing or hanging at various times throughout the working day, seemingly without cause.  I should explain that I have searched these forums, among others, and have been left needing to post to explain our exact scenrio, so apologies if this is a repeated theme that I haven't discovered and I'll happily be directed to other threads as a solution if someone can pigeon-hole our problem to one that has been identified and solved.

Hardware/Software:

AMD FX 8320 Eight Core processors @ 3.5GHz

Dual GeForce GTX 650 Ti GFX cards

16GB Ram

Windows 7 SP1

AutoCAD R11/R14

Experience: During usual usage of AutoCAD our systems will sometimes pause, Windows will soon thereafter display the spinning blue circle of 'semi-infinite thought' and the whole pc is locked down throughout this process.  We can sit here for a period of up to 4mins sometimes although about 1-2mins is a fairly standard pause time, while the pc remains totally unresponsive.  We do have access to mouse movement during the 'hangs' but any attempt to switch between applications will not take place until after AutoCAD has 'come back'.  We cannot Alt-Tab to other applications during this lock down.  Any attempt to access Task Manager to see what processes are running is ineffective until the pause finishes and only then will Task Manager even display.

We also have the issue where any attempt to access the FILE tab during normal AutoCAD use results in a paused lock out as well.  I have attempted the fix regarding setting the options to not display recently opened files and also deleted the recently used files registry key and installing the updated .DLL file and this has not corrected either issue.

We have recently replaced our server with a QNAP file sharing box thinking that this might be server or network related.  It has made no difference to our issue.  We have good days and bad days and they are seemingly without rhyme or reason.  I have had a good day in that I experience only 3 or 4 'hangs' of a couple of minutes at a time during a day with a full office of people but I have also come in on a weekend and been the only one here and found my AutoCAD almost unuseable due to an endless queue of constant hangs lasting minutes.

Safe to say that frustration wins the day currently.  All advice gratefully received and potential solutions considered.  Let me know if you need any additional information.  Thanks in advance.

Cam

[rkmcswain]

Just to clarify for future readers, I presume you are referring to AutoCAD 2011 and 2014, because there were different versions, long ago, named R11 and R14.

Anyway....

Use Process Monitor to watch file/registry activity during your AutoCAD activity. This may offer some clues as to what is stalling the system. (A pause while accessing the FILE menu is a good sign there are some filenames+paths in the recent files that AutoCAD and the O/S can't find on a network location - and the O/S is busy trying to do so with the end result being a delay).

If you need it, here is an overview of how to use Process Monitor, just note that when this post was written, the app name was called FileMon - but it is named Process Monitor now.

Tracking down why that application is slow

[ampster401]

a few things to consider,

1. Check AutoCAD Support File Search Paths (Options > Files tab) and double check there are no old, stale or bad paths.  Remove any that are no longer valid.

2. Check for any old, stale or bad network drive mappings.  Delete any that are not working.

3. Ditto for any printers/plotters setup within the O.S., any non-working printers/plotters should be removed.

All of those can cause Acad to hang every now and then.  When you mention accessing the File tab/menu and it hangs, that to me indicates network or pathing problems.

HTH

[cfare]

Thanks for advice guys.

Just to Clarify, yes I'm talking about Acad 2011/2014. I should also add that when these machines (2 of them are designers pc's) are not running AutoCAD then this problem does not occur, hence my definitive link to this application being involved directly.

I have checked for any bad or unresolved paths in support. We have no old/hangover network paths and we run Cad purely from our C:\ drives rolling out any files or changes required. Advantage of a small office. Or not, if you consider my original post I guess.

I have downloaded Process Monitor and I will see if that gives me any joy. Thanks for the suggestions. Keep 'em coming and I will post back if anything changes.

Cam

[bryce.thelin]

This sounds like it could be the problem of having too many constraints in a drawing or having a build-up of DGN line types. Do you see the problem in brand new drawings or only your existing ones? 

Here is an article that lists some good things to test:

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/article/Copy-and-paste-in-AutoCAD-hangs-for-a-long-time-or-fails-to-wo...

You might also try uninstalling your antivirus program to make sure it is not causing a conflict.

[cfare]

Thanks for the suggestions guys but I am having little joy on this.  It is only the reminders coming out of Autodesk that keep bringing me back so I refocus.

Ok, firstly, it's not a drg constraints issue.  It's also not a linestyle issue as I run the hotfix to remove build-up and it is also a frequent occurence in any and all drawings regardless of file size, attachments or age.  I must stress that this process, when it kicks in, COMPLETELY shuts down my pc including pausing playing music in the background and ceasing all functionality in all applications until AutoCAD comes back (including preventing Task Manager from opening), so it is hogging all resources on a supposedly multi-tasking operating system.

This in itself makes tracking down the issue harder as by the time the 'hang' has occured I am not able to pinpoint the second it happened and Process Manager has logged hundreds and hundreds of events.

Bearing this in mind, I was able to come up with a workaround.  I ran Process Manager and got the system to recreate the hang by activating the FILE TAB as close to a nearest second of the PC clock as I could, this enabled me to track down when the system went into meldown.  This manually activated 'hang' seems to recreate the exact meltdown we are all experiencing and I have to presume that it is the same based on experience.

Presuming this is the case, Process Manager around the time of the hang is reporting pages and pages of lines of activity referencing FLEXnet, which, with a bit of online research I found out is related to the licencing of AutoCAD.  However our AutoCAD products are legit and the system does the licencing checks upon startup each time we load.

I hope this gives any smart cookies out there some further info from which to make suggestions to me on how to go about remedying this annoying occurence.

p.s. I would be happy to provide a readout of the results of Process Manager to somebody able to interpet them better than myself.

Thanks for your patience.

Cam

[ampster401]

Do you by chance use McAfee for virus protection?

[cfare]

No McAfee here mate.  I have rolled out Avast officewide now to replace whatever individuals were running on their machines.  I have tried disabling the virus protection.  This is not a contributing factor here in my opinion having taken steps to eliminate it as a suspect.

[gtunney]

I am experiencing exactly the same issues. I'm running Autocad 2014. I tried installing Autocad 2015 and ran into exactly the same problem. Then uninstalled it.

This began suddenly about (2) weeks ago. I changed nothing. No settings or install of any software. There is a mirror of my set-up being used next to me. Same machine, same software. No problem on this machine. I also tried returning my system to a date before this problem began. Did not fix it.

I am at my wits end. Any suggestion?

[cfare]

No joy gtunney.  I have good days and bad days but cannot offer any solutions or suggestions.  Ghost in the machine?

I'm not sure if it's related and I'd be keen to hear of your experiences as they may mirror my own but I have some mornings in here when I will wait up to 5mins for AutoCAD to even open whilst on others it will whiz through the boot procedure in a matter of seconds.  I cannot claim to have noticed a connection between the two issues with regards to operations or frequency of occurence.

[gtunney]

Thanks for the response. I think I'll do the ALS challenge with my computer.


Gene Tunney
Director of Engineering


Lynch Exhibits
7 Campus Drive
Burlington, NJ 08016
Main 609-387-1600
Cell 609-209-9975
Fax 609-239-1635
gtunney@lynchexhibits.com
http://www.lynchexhibits.com


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[ampster401]

Please exercise caution - and also share the youtube video with us!

[Yorx57]

I agree with ampster, sounds like a network issue - probably network congestion.  Note that changing your file server will not fix network congestion.

As a quick and dirty test, is there a file that you can work on for a day that has no xrefs?  If so, copy the drawing file to your local drive.  Work on it from there and see if you are still getting the freezing.

[gtunney]

Thank you, I'll try that tomorrow.


Gene

[cfare]

This thread has understandably been sitting idle for a long time now and a resolution was never found.

In case anyone else ever comes looking for a solution to a similar problem I wanted to provide a long overdue update.  We have long since replaced the offending computers with updated CAD machines.  We are now running the latest version of AutoCAD on those new machines and we no longer experience this issue.  However, the machines we were using have been rolled on down to the engineers and a junior designer who still have to deal with this issue on a daily basis using different versions of AutoCAD.  Thankfully, if there was ever an upside, it discourages them from doing any of their own drafting which is a plus side for my team an I.

I wanted to mention one other line of investigation that I followed when attempting to resolve this issue.  An old colleague recommended I install Process Manager on my PC to closely monitor the activity of the computer when it was experiencing this issue.  For those of you who have never used Process Manager let me start by explaining that your computer is undertaking thousands of commands and processes for every minute of operation.  As my pc would completely freeze up during this anomaly it was almost impossible to know where exactly to look in the timeline of a log often containing hundreds of lines of feedback for each second of operation.  Thankfully I could manage to replicate the 'freeze' by enabling the 'recently used files' section of CAD under Options/Open and Save, something I had shut off in an attempt to minimise my daily downtime.  While I can't say for sure that this invoked exactly the same issue I was experiencing randomly the response certainly appeared the same at the users end, an immediate blue circle for a mouse pointer and a complete computer freeze for between seconds and minutes at a time.  By enacting the 'freeze' as closely as possible to the nearest second of a known time I was able to go back through the Process Manager report and see exactly what processes were being enabled to the nearest fraction of a second. Interestingly enough at the time of the 'freeze' AutoCAD was sending a request for a license check.

We had long been aware that 4 of the machines in our office at the time, two of which were dedicated drafting machines, were clones.  It is my best guess that somehow these cloned machines were offering up some form of difficulty for Autodesk to independently verify our AutoCAD licenses.  Quite how that ever related to the 'recently used files' aspect of the menu, like indeed the entire problem itself, remains a mystery.

As a side note to the above I would like to thank the AutoCAD moderator who contacted me directly by email some months after the previous last post on this thread to ask if this issue was ever solved.  I cannot remember your name but thank you for the continued interest.