Troubleshooting slowness

[rdlongbow]

C3D 2012

Win7-64

I'm working across a WAN. I was having a problem with it taking a minute or more to bring up the plot dialog, firing up the Mtext and Dtext editors, etc. Our CTB files and special linetypes are all on a server at the home office. As a test, I copied the CTB and linetype folders to my system and reset the paths. Now the plot dialog and editors come up almost instantly.

My question is this: when a drawing is loaded, does all the info in the dwg load, or does only enough to view the drawing load, and anything else that might be needed loaded on demand?

Sometimes when expanding a category in Toolspace, say Alignments for the first time, there can be quite a delay to see my list of alignments. If this info is already loaded with the drawing ( the alignments are all defined in the drawing), it should load instantly. Am I wrong?

Thanks!

Chuck

[rdlongbow]

I meant Fonts folder, not linetypes. Oops!

[Neilw_05]

Part of your problem may be caused by having shortcuts in your plotter folder. If you place shortcuts to folders or files in your plotter support (.pc3) folder, Autocad becomes very slow when switching layouts and in other ways. It seems this might be your problem since performance improves when you change your plotter support path to a new location. The problem should go away if you remove the shortcuts.

[civil]

We have the same issue here where we have a work station on the job site only a kilometre from the office where the server lives. We use a VPN to make the connection. It seems like any time it has to talk to the server there is some lag regardless of file size. You can check with you provider to see if you can increase your bandwidth and make sure all firewalls are happy. One solution that works well is to use a cloud. I have used dropbox to great success to eliminate issues of working off site. It keeps a copy of the file on all local machines and updates all copies as you work with your files.With dropbox however the issue is paths and as I am sure you know paths are important when it comes to CAD. so to get around it we used an MKlink to make dropbox think that files were in the dropbox folder. Sorry though, no magic bullet.

[rdlongbow]

Thanks for the responses. I will check to see if there are any shortcuts in the CTB folder.

[rdlongbow]

No shortcuts in either the CTB or Fonts folders. Other slowness: Expanding Toolspace trees, loading sheetsets, view settings and canceling, on and on and on....

[Neilw_05]

Did you check your plotter support path where your .pc3 files are stored? The path to this folder is found in your plotter support path setting in Autocad Options.

[rdlongbow]

I change the plot style table search path to my local copy of the ctb folder. That's gave me such a vast improvement in the load time of the plot dialog. Same goes for the search path for special fonts. Both were pointing to a location on the Wan. Now they point to my system. I'm suspecting a problem either with the WAN, or the server. That's why I would like to know about what is loaded when a drawing is opened: all, or just some of the data.

[rdlongbow]

More info: When I get a busy cursor, I'm seeing about 0.5% network utilization. When it drops back down, I get control back. The busy cursor/non-responding app happens in may cases: open a settings dialog, switch tabs and cancel, drag and drop a style between drawings, etc. We have Riverbed compressing our WAN traffic, if that matters. We haven't bypassed Riverbed yet since we would have to take down the network for a short while. Maybe this weekend. Any other ideas out there? Thanks.

[rdlongbow]

OK. We have determined that the slowness is due to our outdated server that a bulk of our projects reside. It has MS server 2003, which uses SMB as it's communication protocol ( I hope that's correct!) SMB is very sensitive to latency, besides being a bit kludgy by design. When I moved one of my projects to another server with MS Server 2008, which uses SMB2, wow!, What a difference!

Unfortunately, they won't let me move my projects. The old server is due to be replaced next month. I have to put up with the slowness until then because C3D, like I noted in previous replys, insists on communicating with the server while I'm working on a drawing. I expect the slowness during loads and saves, but why is it running out to the server when ever I do something, even if it is just a plain Autocad command? Checking for a license? Grabbing more info from the file on the server? I though when I loaded a drawing, it was all in the memory on my system. Am I wrong?

On the new server, I saw the busy cursor just briefly, so I suspect that this communication was going on with it too, but because it is so much faster, it didn't slow me down.

Thanks for any replies in advance.

Chuck

[TravisNave]

You might benefit from working locally by using Vault to check out your projects locally and store them back on the server when you are done.  Invalid links, shortcuts, broken mapped drives, offline printers, digital signatures, and overall WAN latency can contribute to your slowness problem. 

[rdlongbow]

We are not setup for Vault. Just getting on a new server should do the trick, though.

As an example, when I tested a project with a pipe network on both the 2003 and 2008 servers, the results were pretty dramatic. Listing the pipes (31) in Toolspace on the 2003 server took 1 min. 45 sec. Sometimes it took much longer. On the 2008 server, it took 2 secs.