Hello I am a Tech for the IT dept for a county and I have been in a uphill battle with our Public Works Department with improving speeds loading projects and drawings over the network. As it currently stands all the Engineers have powerful Dell Precision T5600 Desktops with a 1GB link directly to the engineering server, but drawings take forever to Load, it locks up for awhile when saving and the bigger the drawing the longer it takes over all. So my question is what is the best practice or what are my options to improve loading Cival 3d from a dedicated server? We tried copying over drawings localy and confirmed the Desktops are not the problem cause everything loads very quickly without a hitch and its not a option to copy and paste over everything they need to do every day of the week. We have been in the works with the Autocad vender we get the licensing for and they said Vault is the exact prodct that fixes that issue but the PW dept refuses to try it and i dont know enough about it and hope i could get some insite on weather or not it a good tool or not and if there is any other options besides vault. I appricate any assistace on this cause as of right now we are out of ideas.
Thanks,
Any chance you have any alternatives worth trying? and i thought Vault Caches the files you check out which speeds it up over the network at leased thats what the Autocad Vender said it worked.
I too work for a County Gov't as the CAD manager and I was able to get our IT dept. to let us install our anti-virus software locally, so that it wasn't all controlled by group policy. We wrote exclusions for the autocad related software and *.dwg and other associated formats. This helped tremendously! Since we get very few dwgs from outside sources (and they're scanned anyway when they're copied to the network), we haven't run into any issues. We also run ESRI software and have excluded the applications files for it as well, although ESRI doesn't seem to require the memory overhead that Autodesk Civil products do.
You mention the type of workstation, but not the amount of memory. We run with 16Gb minimum.
Thank you for the response, unfortunately our Antivirus solution is all local and managed very lightly with little overhead and not through GPO and I have over 30 exclusions including the drawing types, folders, programs etc all recamended by Autocad and other engineers, scans are even engineered to go off during the off hours etc and we had our autocad vender test all this very carefully when i asked them to look at this issue we even shutdown AV on the local machines and on the server and it didnt change speeds at all and we determined it wasnt AV related and the AV software is usually the first thing venders go after when we bring up issues like this.
Desktop Specs of the Precision T5600 is the Following.
3.0GHZ Quad Core Xeon
16GB of 1800mhz DDR3 Ram
2GB Nvidia Quadro 4000
500GB 10k SAS Drive
They are using Cival 3D 2013/2014 currently and they are standalone licenses, there temp file is seperate called AutocadTemp
That is a possability, currently the server is Virutalized on our Vmware infrastruture could that make a difference? Is Cival 3D something that should be on its own dedicated server? Or would just creating a new server on Vmware be just fine if we decided to just rebuild it?
Well i was kind of hoping Twik would reply back to my post, Our Engineering server is currently sitting in our VM datacenter, and we have no problems rebuilding it from scratch with more resources, but i am just wondering if it would make a difference making it a physical server rather then a VM, i wouldnt think it would but then running Autocad is def out of our conform zones and seem to play differently then our other systems heh.
Hey Briggsa,
Thanks for the vote of confidence! However, I'm not an IT person by trade. What I know is way beyond the layman, but only enough to get me in trouble and eventually back out again :). So, please, run my ideas past some coworkers if you can before chasing a possible pipe dream.
1. Virtualization itself should have no effect on CAD. CAD is looking to make typical Windows file system calls. As long as you are configured to properly simulate a Windows server environment, you should be good to go. If you are running it on a Linux server and emulating NTFS, you could very possibly be causing some problems for CAD. Try spinning up some small servers with different settings and try to access some CAD files that way.
2. It's all about the file system and OS calls. AutoCAD makes a lot of obscure calls to Windows and the FS. This is evident when you see versions of Civil3D just completely breaking on new operating systems. Make sure your server is compatible with modern Windows commands. Make sure you are using NTFS and not FAT32.
3. What kind of disk drives are you using for server storage? 7200+RPM for hard drives is a must. If your server is caching from a slow drive, consider allocating more caching space. A "cold open" from the disk is going to really bottleneck things. Being able to open from an SSD or RAM is *much* better. Long open times for a project that hasn't been worked on in a while isn't a big deal if it means your currently most used files are fast to access.
4. Setup a clean CAD station with default Civil 3D settings. Don't do any customization, especially to the Support File Paths. Then, try to open some CAD files from the same network as your engineering team. If your performance increases big time, it has something to do with your CAD customization. It could be a bad script, but more likely it is bottle-necking in one of the Support Paths somewhere. A fast server for your settings (or local storage of settings) is just as important as a fast projects server.
Good luck!
Edit: One more idea!
5. Consider taking that clean CAD station and accessing the files from elsewhere on the network. You may have a fast, dedicated pipe between the users, but what the switches and routers may be struggling with all the requests. Tap into the network as close the server as possible. Bypass all the engineering team's nodes if possible. If that speeds things up, slowly work your way back out until you find the bottleneck. Consider removing or replacing that piece of hardware.
Thank you twilk, some of that info is very useful, i figured VM shouldnt have any issues but just never know, Cad is out of my realm of expertiease so i am always open to feedback when it comes to supporting engineering at a IT standpoint. I printed out your recmendations and i will discussing with my coworker about this and most likely design a new VM for the engineering team and testing the suggesting you said below about caching, and running cad from scratch with no scripts etc. I appricate all the feedback! i will post my findings once we move forward on this.
Thanks,
Aaron
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